


How To Keep A Promise To Hal Jordan

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 14:48:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 54,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23107126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: Hal Jordan's memory has been wiped, and Bruce is the only one who can help him re-construct it. What is the mysterious connection between his memory loss and Bruce Wayne, and why does Bruce say that it's because of him?Special thanks on this one go to the inaccurately namednotwiselyfor the kind help with formatting.
Relationships: Hal Jordan/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 415
Kudos: 649
Collections: Ashes' Library, Hal and Bruce





	1. Chapter 1

  
**PROLOGUE**  


“Yeah, it’s open,” Hal responded to the ping on his door. He didn’t look up from the screen he was working on, because damn if being wounded and in rehab for six weeks didn’t mean a shit-ton of paperwork, as far as the Corps was concerned. It did seem like they could cut him a little slack. He had had to spend most of the last week on the Watchtower just catching up on this bureaucratic bullshit, and Carol was gonna have his balls for dinner when he did eventually get back to work.

To his surprise Bruce walked in, and he came in and just stood by Hal’s desk, which was probably supposed to be Batman for “sorry to interrupt, but do you have a second?” He was just standing there. Like a large uncommunicative hunk of rock, and with about as much personality, not to mention social skills. “Spooky,” he sighed. “To what do I owe the pleasure.”

Bruce pulled off his cowl. “I have something for you,” he said. 

“Ooookay. Well, I’ve been back two weeks now, but I guess welcome home presents are always acceptable. Unless it’s one of those baby goat things.”

Bruce frowned, and looked confused. Or mildly constipated, he was really just guessing when it came to Bruce’s facial expressions. “Like those things where you sponsor a family in some third world country,” Hal said. “You know, and you buy them a baby goat or something, and you get pictures of the family with the goat? Because fuck that, if you’re buying me a goat, I want the goddamn goat. Those pics are probably all doctored anyway, it’s a scam, it’s probably not even a real family.”

“It’s not a goat. And you’re thinking of Heifer International, which is most assuredly not a scam. The Wayne Foundation provides them quite a bit of funding.” 

Hal gave a snort. “Yeah, I bet. Well if it’s not a scam, it’s a tax shelter for rando billionaires. The philanthro-capitalist industrial complex, man.”

“Someone’s been spending time with Oliver.”

He laughed at that, because that had in fact been a phrase Ollie had used a few days ago. Fuck if he knew what it meant. Of course what it really meant was that Ollie’s self-hatred as one of those rando billionaires was profound, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you pointed out to your buddy over beers on a Wednesday night. Bruce had walked to the window and was staring out it, hands clasped behind his back. Like Hal had somehow invited him to hang out here for a while. 

“So anyway,” Hal said. “I kinda need to get finished with these reports, so if you had something you wanted to give me. . .” He trailed off, but Bruce was still just standing there, looking out into the darkness of space. Like his mind was a million miles away. When he glanced over at Hal, there was a look on his face Hal had never seen there before.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said, “and I’m not sure how to do it. I should have done it before now, the truth is, but I’ve spent the last two weeks struggling with how to do it. The only way I know to begin is with a question. Do you trust me?”

Hal frowned. This was not a Spooky he had ever seen before. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

“An important one. If the answer is, I trust you, but only to a point, or I trust you, but only in certain situations, then I’m not sure you’re going to believe the things I have to tell you. Because the things I have to tell you are not things you are going to want to believe. So I need to know how far your trust goes.”

Hal met his eyes. “Bruce. I trust you. And whatever you tell me, I’m gonna believe.”

Bruce was still looking at him inscrutably. “Your memories of the last six months are a lie,” he said. 

Hal blinked at him. Was Spooky a day drinker? He had never seemed like the type, but it was always the silent ones you had to watch. “Ahhh. . .” he said. “Okay. Well. Any reason why you think that?”

“I don’t think that, I know that. They are memories that the Guardians put into your brain to erase the truth of what happened to you, and how you were injured.”

“Um, how I got injured was, I got shot out of the sky by Thanagarian nerve weapons, and had to spend like two months getting my entire neurological system re-booted on Oa, which was a barrel of shits and giggles for me, lemme tell ya.”

“Some of that is true. You have suffered neurological injury, and you have been recovering on Oa. But there was no encounter on Thanagar. That is simply what the Guardians want you to believe.”

“Riiiiight,” Hal said. “So, um, listen. Of the two of us, one of us has a diagnosed bipolar paranoia condition, and one of us does not, so maybe I should listen to the one of us who doesn’t, which is to say, the one who’s not you?”

“How do you know that?”

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know that I have a diagnosed bipolar paranoia condition?”

Hal hesitated. “I. . .”

“I would have had to tell you that. Do you remember me telling you that? That’s the only way you could know something like that, right?”

There was a flicker, was the only way Hal could describe it. A flicker in his brain, like when the electricity went out for just a millisecond, so quick your eyes almost didn’t see it, and for a few seconds you’re left wondering, _wait, what just happened?_ Bruce was still looking at him. He tried to find something to say. How did he know that? He didn’t remember Bruce ever telling him that, but somehow he did know it. 

“Hal,” Bruce was saying, and since when did Bruce say his name like that? “You weren’t injured in a firefight on Thanagar. You haven’t been anywhere near Thanagar. You were injured because of me.”

“Because of _you_?”

“Yes. I’m the reason for everything that has happened to you.”

“That’s. . . insane. This whole conversation is insane. You are so massively off your meds I can’t even begin to. . . stop, just stop, all right? And what the hell do you mean, the Guardians put stuff in my head? You know absolutely zero about how the Guardians operate, but to start with, they don’t do that to people. Okay? They’re not out there brainwashing people, especially Lanterns. That is just. . . that’s fucked up, all right?”

“They did it to you,” Bruce said softly. “And right now there’s a part of you that knows everything I’m saying is true.” 

He sat there, his chest tight. There was something he should be saying right now. He should be telling Bruce how crazy he was, what a fucking head case. But it was the man’s quiet certainty that he couldn’t figure out. He was just standing there, completely calm, telling Hal that his life was a lie. Like that was a normal conversation that normal people had. There were words he needed to be saying, but somehow he couldn’t find them. His throat had tightened on him. 

Bruce put a thumb drive on the corner of his desk. Slid it toward him. 

“This is for you,” he said. “It’s my recollection of the last six months. I’ve left nothing out, though there are parts of the story I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. There are parts that only you know. But as for what’s on that drive, you can ask anyone in the League to corroborate the facts and circumstances. Leslie would be a good place to start, since she can show you your medical records. Clark is another good place to go. He was there for a lot of it. Not for the parts that concern only you and me.” 

There was a spasm in Hal’s jaw that wouldn’t stop. Why wouldn’t it stop. “Why are you doing this?” he said, past the clench in his throat.

“Because I made a promise. And I keep my promises.”

“Right,” he said hoarsely. “Because you promised the voices in your head that you would go fuck with someone this morning.”

“No. I made a promise to you.”

He found nothing to say to that. He looked at the drive like it was a snake lying there on his desk. Probably he would open it and it would be blank. Or it would be filled with the same sentence over and over, like this was the motherfucking Shining. _All work and no play makes Batman a dull boy._ Or in this case, a completely unstable nut job. Bruce was not well. He was having delusions. He should go tell Clark about it. No, not Clark, stay away from Clark. Something in his brain didn’t want him to talk to Clark, flinched at the thought. Why? What the fuck was going on? 

Still Bruce was just standing there. “Please just read it,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

Hal nodded. “Okay,” he said numbly. Bruce looked like there was something else he wanted to say. Like there was something he wanted to do. Almost like he was about to lift his hand and – do what? But then Hal saw him clench his hand in the gauntlet.

“Thank you,” he said, and he swept out the door, cape fanning out behind him. The door gave a tinny ping as it slid shut behind him. Hal sat at his desk for a long time after he had gone. The thing to do was to get up and go immediately to Clark, tell him about this whole insane conversation, let him know what was going on with Bruce. Someone should probably be concerned. He stared at the drive. 

He went back to his work after a while, mindlessly filling in information. He didn’t look at the drive or touch it, but he knew it was there. After several more hours’ work, he shut his laptop. It was time to finally head back home, go crash on his own bed for a few blessed hours. Then he could get in touch with Carol, maybe go log some flights. He had shit to do, he did not have any more time for Batman’s paranoid delusions. 

He got up and twisted his ring so he was out of uniform. No one around on the Watchtower at this hour, most likely. He pulled on a jacket and headed to the zeta platforms. He had keyed in the coordinates when he stood there, thinking. He walked off the platform and braced himself on the wall. His head was spinning. Well. That was just the exhaustion. Anyone would feel the same way, after what he had been through. He had had his guts shredded and stitched back together, his whole neurology re-wired.

_I’m the reason for everything that has happened to you._

Why the fuck would Bruce think that? What paranoid delusion was telling him that? It wasn’t true, he had barely even seen Bruce these last six months, stationed on Thanagar. Had barely seen anyone in the League. And somehow Bruce thought it was his fault that Hal had been wounded? No, he hadn’t said fault. Hadn’t said, I’m to blame. He had said, _I’m the reason,_ which sounded even creepier. Megalomaniac delusions. And yet the man standing in his quarters this afternoon hadn’t looked deluded. Hadn’t looked like he had thought this was all about him, like he was having some egomaniac episode. Then again, he hadn’t looked sorry for it either. Hadn’t said he was sorry. He had just looked. . . 

Strange. 

Without knowing he was going to do it, he walked back to his quarters. The lights came on. There on his desk was the thumb drive, right where Bruce had left it. He stared at it. And then he crossed to his desk, flipped open his laptop, and inserted the drive. 

There was only one file on it, and it was labeled “For Hal.” Not Jordan, not Lantern. Hal. He stared at it for another few minutes. Still time to head back to the zeta platform. Still time to walk out and throw the drive in the incinerator on his way. 

He opened the file. _Chapter One,_ said the first document. With a hesitant finger, he clicked. Blinked at what he saw. Started to read, frowning. _Author’s Note_, read the first line. Author’s Note? What the ever-living fuck? Was Bruce about to make him read his poetry? He quickly read the rest of the page.

**_Author’s Note:_**

_I have tried packaging this information in any number of ways, but every time I try to write the bare facts of it, it ends up sounding unconvincing, even to me. I can only imagine what it would sound like to you. So in the end I decided on this way – to tell you a story. The disadvantages of this method are clear: you are only seeing a very limited and imperfect viewpoint, that is to say, mine. When I first tried writing this, I wrote it in first person. But that didn’t feel objective enough, somehow, and I need you to understand that everything you are about to read is absolute and incontrovertible fact. But they are nonetheless only the facts as I experienced them. So I have told this story in the third person, which probably will make you even more concerned than you currently are for the state of my mental health. I can only say, it felt easier to tell the truth this way. _

_I have left nothing out. There are parts I would have preferred to gloss over. But I haven’t known what stray observance, what random description might trigger a corroborating memory in you. So I have been ruthless, with myself most of all, and I have done my best to describe all of our interactions in vivid detail – considerably more vivid than you might want, in places, and for that I apologize._

_Thank you for opening this document, and for trusting me enough to read. _

_–B.W._

He stared at the initials for a few minutes. And then with a shaking finger he scrolled down. 

_Chapter One_, read the next line. _On The Javelin_. 


	2. Chapter 2

** Chapter One: On The Javelin **

Bruce reached for the flight stabilization lever on the Javelin, and breathed through the pain of the spasm in his back. He was grateful for the training and discipline that made possible the suppression of any involuntary noise – that was all he needed, was a gasp of pain for Jordan to hear. Bad enough he was locked in a metal tube with Hal Jordan for the better part of a week; he didn’t need to make it worse. 

“Time for the in-flight movie, I’d say,” Jordan said, propping his feet on the control panel and stretching out his long legs. His actual feet. On the controls of the Javelin. Bruce let the tightening of his jaw be his only response.

“How’d I get so lucky, huh?” Jordan was saying with a grin. “Like, a week’s vacation to the beautiful methane-filled Gamma Quadrant, a dicey diplomatic mission for shits and giggles, and to top it all off, I got _you_ to keep me company. What could be better, amirite?”

“You need to spend your time reviewing the material I prepared on Andallian diplomatic procedure,” Bruce said, through thin lips.

“Oh right, your very helpful pamphlet. Yeah, you know what seems like a good use of my time, is scrolling through your intergalactic e-how, instead of, I dunno, accessing the literal bajillion terabytes of information on my ring. But whatever, I’m sure your stuff is nice too,” he said, and he cracked his knuckles, stretching his arms behind his head. 

“There is information specific to our relationship with the Andallians that is going to be crucial for you to absorb before we get there. I apologize for not providing illustrations, or scratch-n-sniff, or whatever it is you use when you attempt to actually read something. Why don’t I print out every page and scrawl BOOBIES across it, will that suffice to hold your attention?”

Jordan had shut his eyes. “Eat a bag of dicks, Spooky. I’m gonna take a rest here, and if during my nap you feel the uncontrollable urge to be a pus-infected cock-knob, you just go on and write down everything you were gonna say, and I’ll read it when I wake up.”

Bruce was silent, nettled that Jordan had gotten that kind of a rise out of him. Now he was the one who looked childish. It had been because of the pain. That was why his temper was so short, why he had snapped at Jordan like that. He got up and went to the rear of the ship, where he could swallow some meds away from Jordan’s prying observation. He leaned his head against the rear bulkhead and concentrated on slowing his breathing, on riding the waves of pain without resistance. 

If it had been possible to hand this mission off to anyone else, he would have done it. But Jordan’s presence was a necessity; the Andallians knew and respected (grudgingly) the Lantern Corps, and they would listen to the uniform. Clark had offered to go, and Diana had too, but the fact of the matter was, no one knew the Andallian situation like he himself did, and no one had a better shot at communicating the League’s desire for productive relations with the biggest power player in this section of the galaxy. And always, in any of these contacts, the worry: the worry that for all their smiles and handshakes and polite phrases, everyone they encountered was really looking past them to that shimmering blue jewel of a planet spinning just behind them. Earth had already suffered one invasion, and she could not withstand another. They were no match for intergalactic firepower, and that was where the League came in. That was where diplomacy, tactical friendship, careful alliances came in. And Bruce was the one who had spent months studying Andallian language and culture and rituals; it had to be him. 

He closed his eyes and waited for the drugs to take effect. A fine diplomatic contact he was going to make, high out of his ever-loving mind. He would have to make this his last dose before they landed. 

“Uh oh,” Jordan said from the cockpit.

“What do you mean, uh oh?” Bruce was striding forward when the first shot caught their starboard bow.

“That’s what I mean by uh oh,” Jordan said, pulling the steering mechanism closer and engaging combat protocols. Bruce slid into place, flipping open scans.

“You said this was neutral space,” he growled. “Won’t be any trouble at all, I recall you saying. A walk in the park, you said. I distinctly recall that—”

“You wanna shut up and fucking engage?” Hal was flipping switches, and he banked them hard left and into a roll. “I need you to return some fire here, you know if it’s not too much fucking trouble!”

“Before we even know who we’re firing at? Or are you forgetting that we’re supposed to be on a diplomatic mission to this sector of space, and our entire reason for being here is to make friends with the local population, not shoot it out of the sky!”

“Oh okay, awesome! That’s gonna be a real fucking successful diplomatic mission once we’re DEAD! Will you FUCKING ENGAGE or would you rather spend more time making this _my_ fault?!” The Javelin was rocked by another shot to her starboard, and her shields were not going to hold for much longer. 

“Shut up and fly,” Bruce said, settling into the controls. 

“Okay, hang onto your skivvies, I’m gonna get us the hell out of here, unless you’ve got any objections. Like, maybe you feel we should open diplomatic negotiations, try to see if we can find some common ground, maybe exchange—”

“FLY, GODDAMMIT!” Bruce roared, and the Javelin was banking hard right this time, ducking under a nearby asteroid, taking evasive action that lurched Bruce into the control panels. 

“You did that on purpose,” he muttered. But whoever they were, they were no match for Hal’s flying; their shots went wide as Hal ducked and swerved. Of course, the Javelin was no match for them in firepower. Fast as she was, this was essentially a transport, not a fighter, and what weapons she had were never going to be enough to bring down another spacecraft. What strafing Bruce was able to lay down was a distraction, but not a serious threat. Evasion was going to be their only salvation here, and he saw Hal’s quick eyes scanning the monitors nearby, looking for the out he needed. 

“There,” he said, nodding at the screen. “We can jump to light speed and tuck into that big asteroid over there. Should have a large enough gravitational field to fuck with their sensors. Lay us some cover, Spooky, Imma save our asses.” 

The gut-roil of the shift to light speed caught him off-guard – Hal was speeding the jump, hoping to give them the crucial few seconds to hide that they would need. And who the hell was out here taking pot-shots at random transports? Not that he knew enough about space politics to understand the answer, if he had it, but Jordan surely did. They needed an identifying mark on the vessel, something that would help them figure out who their assailants were. Unless they were Andallian, but somehow he didn’t think so – the glimpse he had caught of the cruiser didn’t look like anything Andallian he had seen images of. 

“Fuck,” Hal breathed, as they jolted out of light speed and spun over the asteroid.

“What fuck?”

“That fuck,” he said, as the shockwave hit them. It knocked Bruce halfway across the cockpit, and he was dimly aware of more cursing from Jordan, of endless spinning, and of a bone-crunching thud as they landed. It tore a moan from him as his back wrenched, and it was like he could hear the bone snapping – the last thread of his last remaining functional vertebra, just quietly giving up and snapping like a chicken bone. He tried to muffle his groan of pain, but couldn’t. 

“Bruce!” Jordan called, leaping up from the controls. Jordan was trying to lift him, and he saw that Jordan was looking frantically for any injury, trying to figure out what had happened. It had been a rough crash-landing, and if his back was the only thing broken, they would be lucky. 

“Bruce, tell me what’s going on,” he was saying, and Bruce waved him off, tried to sit up. He rolled to his side instead, bit his lip to the blood to stifle the moan. Dug his fingers into the metal floor to beat back the waves of agony. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

“Your back,” Jordan said quietly, and that was just lovely, wasn’t that just the best, that Jordan knew. 

“It’s fine,” Bruce said, his voice harsher than he meant it to be. “Just see to the ship.”

“Let’s get you up first,” Jordan said, and the gentleness in his voice made Bruce want to rip off pieces of the ship and hurl them into a nearby star.

“Don’t touch me,” he snarled, but he could feel Jordan still crouched there, watching him. God, for the pleasure of punching that man in the face. “Just—go—do—damage—assessment,” he managed, and he let his eyes slide shut, just for a blessed minute. 

When he opened them again, he realized he had in fact passed out. Worse, he was now lying on one of the bunks in the back of the ship, where Jordan must have carried him. His cowl had been removed before – not much point to concealing his identity in space, and it was the opposite of helpful on a diplomatic mission – but now the catches on his suit had been released as well. He was in his shirt and underlayer. He spared a moment to be impressed that Jordan had figured out how to do that; the Batsuit did not exactly come with buttons that said, _press here_. 

He sat up and swung his legs over the bed. His back was a dull roaring throb, but he was used to that. The pain shooting down his legs was more worrisome, and it meant that there was definitely nerve damage. He rubbed at his head, tried to orient himself. The cabin lights in the Javelin were running, so whatever had been knocked loose in their landing, it hadn’t been their power source. 

“Hey,” Jordan said, ducking his head to enter the sleeping bay. He was wiping grease off his hands, and he looked out of breath. 

“Status report,” Bruce said hoarsely. 

“Well, I’m a little thirsty, took a bit of a bang on my forehead when I miscalculated where that electrical panel was, but all in all I’ve been worse, thanks for asking.”

“I meant the Javelin.”

“Yeah no shit. That could be worse too. The good news is, we definitely evaded whoever wanted to use us for target practice.”

“And the bad news?”

“The bad news is, that’s all the evading we’re gonna be doing for a bit. I’ve been out to take a look around, and our transverse couplers got knocked out of alignment on that last bump. I can fix it, but not with any tools I’ve got handy right now.”

“And we’re out of communication range.”

“Yeah, thanks to that light speed jump, we sure as hell are. Hey, now would be the time for you to come clean about that telepathic bond you and Supes have got going on. You’ve got that, right? Like, you stare off into the depths of space and just think his name really hard – _Kal-El, Kal-El_ or some shit like that – and he’ll come find you, right?”

Bruce just fixed him with a level stare. “Worth a shot,” Jordan said. “Well look, we’ve got other options. We’ve still got—”

“Our emergency communication signals,” Bruce said. “Which should be a handy way for whoever was looking for us before to come finish the job, especially now that we’re sitting ducks.”

“Look at you and those strategic assessments.”

“So we send you,” Bruce said.

“Send me?”

“Yes. Your ring makes light speed jumps all the time. You head back to the Watchtower, get us what we need and let people know where we are, and come back here for repairs.”

“Slight problem.”

“Which is?”

“Our friends,” Jordan said, tapping at a monitor screen behind him. It was just basic scanning array here in the Javelin’s sleeping quarters, but enough to get the job done. Bruce stared at the monitor, and the blips circling them.

“They made the jump too,” he said.

“Yep. And they brought other friends. It’s apparently a party.”

“We’re undetectable?”

“Yeah, should be. For one thing, we did throw them off a little. They think we’re in this system over here, not in the asteroid belt. So we’ve got that advantage. If we had engine capacity, I could probably lift us off and do the old ‘nothing to see here we’re just another space rock’ float away thingie. As it is, not so much.”

“The Javelin’s light speed and non-light speed engine drives—”

“Are separate, yeah. So in theory I ought to be able to repair the light speed drive and with a little bit of luck, I can boost us straight into light speed without tearing her hull to pieces.”

“In theory.”

“Theory’s our best bet in this situation. Well no, Superman just happening to wander by is our actual best bet.”

Bruce let himself lean against the wall of the ship. His eyes slid shut. “How long do you estimate that repair will take?”

“Working flat out I can do it in three days. Our power should hold out that long, if I strip us down to non-essentials.”

“You’ll have my help as well. I don’t know her as well as you do, but between the two of us we ought to be able to make that happen.”

Jordan was wiping down a ring spanner, examining it thoughtfully. “You took quite a hit,” he said. 

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

“I’m the judge of that,” he snapped.

“I scanned your back with my ring.”

That knocked the wind out of him. Jordan was just watching him, and there was something in his quiet watchfulness that was enraging. It was almost. . . sympathetic. The last thing he needed was anyone’s pity, but the thought of Jordan’s pity was especially nauseating. “That was an invasion of privacy,” he said through clenched jaw. 

“I needed to know the extent of your injury, and what was the likelihood you would be mobile. So yeah, I let the ring take a look. Jesus Christ, Bruce,” but he didn’t sound angry. His eyes were still just resting on Bruce. “Jesus Christ, how are you functional?”

A thousand retorts to make. A thousand sharp replies. _Mind your own business, you overgrown man-child. Stay the hell out of my life. You know nothing about me. Don’t touch me. Get away. Pay attention to the ship and leave me the hell alone._

“I’m not,” was the thing he said. He let his eyes slide shut again. 

“Yeah. Well, I’m no expert, and I’m not saying I really understood half of what the ring was showing me, but maybe you should think about having a doctor take a look at that?”

Bruce gave a long low laugh. His head was starting to pound. Possibly he had managed to concuss himself in that fall too. This day was just looking better and better. “Now there’s an idea,” he said. With a herculean effort, he grabbed onto the rail over his head and hauled himself to his feet. The cabin took a decided lurch to the left, but he held his ground. 

“All right,” he said. “Come on, we’d better get to work.” 

Jordan looked skeptical, but at least he didn’t say anything. He followed Bruce out, and Bruce stood there surveying the disemboweled wreckage of electrical paneling Jordan had been working on. “I’m thinking I should be the one to get lowered into the hole,” Jordan said, sliding down into the guts of the ship, ring spanner tucked under his arm.

“And what exactly are you hoping to accomplish with a tool you bought at Ace Hardware?”

“Oh that’s not for fixing the ship,” he called. He had slid mostly out of sight now, and Bruce crouched down – oh, the agony of that casual movement – to take a look at the panel read-outs and try to puzzle out exactly what they were going to have to re-route. From the looks of it, everything. “The spanner’s for opening the stash of hooch I keep down here,” he called, muffled under some metal sheeting, and there was a series of metallic bangs underneath Bruce’s feet.

“Please tell me you are joking,” he said, but then the next instant Jordan had re-emerged, grinning, a bottle of scotch in each hand. He plunked them down and pushed the hair out of his face. 

“I’m not going to my grave drinking Cutty Sark, what the hell is wrong with you,” Bruce said. 

“Unbelievable. Well you’re welcome to haul your ungrateful ass to the package store, but if I’m gonna work for the next sixteen hours straight I’m gonna require a little lubrication, and I don’t know about you but—”

“Hal.”

“What? Oh what, is this where you remind me there’s no drinking on the Javelin? Because excuse me while I—”

“Hal,” he said again, tapping the gauge tucked next to the hatch. They stared at it together. 

“Well,” Jordan said after a minute. “Could be that it’s malfunctioning.”

“If that pressure reading’s correct, the drive is likely to implode on engagement.”

“Yeah thanks, I get how space works.” Jordan had hauled himself up and was peering at it. “One of us is gonna have to go out and take a look, see if it’s the gauge or not.”

“You keep working, I’ll get suited up. Out of curiosity, and if it comes to it, how effective is that ring’s shielding against the full firepower of a weapons array? And is there any chance that if we abandon the Javelin you could outrun them with just your ring?”

“I’d feel a hell of a lot better about it with some back-up.”

“And what are our chances of some Lantern back-up out here?”

“Oh, you know. . . why don’t we just stick with Plan A for now.” 

“How confidence-inspiring,” he said, reaching for an exterior suit.


	3. Chapter 3

** Chapter Two **

He lost track of time as they worked, and the hours bled into each other divorced from any sense of day or night. It would have made more sense for Jordan to do the exterior hull work, but there was always the chance that their hostile guests would pick up a Lantern signature, and right now going undetected was their chief advantage. It was slower going for Bruce, but it was safer, and the truth was, the weightlessness of space was the best possible thing for his back. 

They collapsed after twelve hours, panting in their bunks. Jordan handed him the bottle of Cutty Sark and he took it wordlessly, swallowing past its metallic bitterness until he hit the necessary burn. He handed it back to Jordan, who drank even more deeply. They had turned the environmentals down to the bare bones, which meant the Javelin was getting chillier by the hour. Pretty soon he was going to have to ask Jordan to crank the heat up, because the cold was making his back muscles clench even worse. 

“Good work out there,” Jordan said into the dark, and Bruce grunted in reply. 

“I’m gonna assume that’s Wayne for ‘you too Jordan,’” he said, in an imitation of Bruce’s baritone. The accuracy of it was irritating. 

He lay there in his bunk staring into the darkness, feeling the chill settle into his bones. Sleep eluded him, and something told him Jordan was still awake too. The Javelin had taken a gash on the hull that there was no fixing, and the likelihood she would explode on acceleration was high. They were probably both running the calculation in their heads, he knew. “You’ll have to go for help alone,” Bruce said at last.

“Bullshit I’m doing that,” came the quiet answer in the dark.

“You know it’s the only reasonable recourse. If you’re transporting me, you’re going to be moving more slowly. You can’t hit speed, if you’ve got me with you. It’s the only thing that makes sense. You can be gone and back in twelve hours, with all the help we need.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“For God’s sake, what do you think is going to happen?”

“You seriously think I am leaving you stranded on a rock in the middle of space with no weapons, low oxygen, and a battle cruiser parked the next block over? I mean, sure Bats, you piss me off plenty, but even I have my limits.”

“You have another plan?”

“My plan is, we fix this ship, punch her into drive, and get the fuck out of here. End of discussion.” 

Bruce was silent. “Unless,” Jordan said.

“Unless?”

“Unless you and Supes really do have some sort of secret-channel communication going on. Because now would be the time to tell me.”

“Go to sleep, you idiot.” And he rolled over, trying to pull the thin blanket tighter around him. It was a tactical error, because a stab of pain shot up his spine as he twisted. He knew his sharp intake of breath had been audible. He lay there wrapped in silence and shame. 

“Hey.” Jordan’s voice was quieter even than before, a low thread of sound. “You okay?”

“Spectacular,” he snapped.

* * *

They slept in snatches, and worked in wordless frantic speed, racing their gauges. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Lantern could be an efficient worker when he needed to be, but it did. They spent the next morning – or whatever the equivalent of morning was out here – working on the instrument panel together, silently handing each other tools, correcting each other’s work with a quick nudge or a nod. He headed outside for hull repair work after that, while Jordan worked on the drive, and they were just going to have to take the risk of the electrical signature from tools, because that hull had to be at least held together. So he set to work with the welder, and let his mind sink into his work. After a while he startled at Lantern’s hand on his shoulder.

“What the hell,” he said angrily into his comm. “I thought we had agreed not to risk anyone detecting a Lantern field.”

“Yeah well, you’re killing yourself out here, and I’ve got the easy job inside, so why don’t we switch for a bit.”

“I don’t intend to get shredded by alien laser beams because you got bored. Go back inside and get to work.”

“Hand me that tool, asshole, before I weld your face shut. Jesus Christ.”

And Jordan snatched it from his hands, because he was eleven years old. “For God’s sake,” Bruce muttered.

“Yeah, you wanna punch me, don’t you, but there’s no punching in space. Now get the fuck back inside, come on, you’re wasting oxygen just scowling at me like that. Your brooding is probably what’s using up all our air, who knows how much O2 is required to maintain that angry jawline. Go on, get going.”

So he spent the rest of the day wrestling with the drive, and was impressed with the engineering patches Jordan had configured – the man might not be formally trained as an engineer, but he had good instincts. He would tell him that if he weren’t so physically irritating to be around. 

They ate their power bars in sullen exhaustion, and fell into bed. Most of their meal was what was left of the Cutty Sark, passing the bottle silently back and forth again. But sleep wouldn’t come, maybe because he had pushed his body too hard. He knew it was the same for Jordan, and they lay there in the dark. 

Too cold to sleep – that was probably the issue. If they turned up the environmentals, they could maybe sleep, and if they could sleep, they could work more efficiently, and if they could work more efficiently, they could get the hell out of here before those gauges dipped any closer to the red. Or, they turned up the environmentals and ended up pushing those gauges into the red before they got their work done, and they ended up having to abandon the Javelin and trying to make it on the strength of Lantern’s ring alone, which did not sound like the option likely to leave them alive, if that warship were still parked in their back yard. Nothing like lying awake in the cold and dark trying to calculate exactly how you wanted to die. 

When he woke, he knew it was worse. Everything was worse, actually – the air was so cold and thin in the Javelin that functioning was going to be a challenge, but the pain had progressed to shooting down both legs now, and up his spine if he attempted to move. All he wanted to do was turn his head to the wall and sob with it. Worst of all, Jordan had let him sleep, and he was alone in the sleeping quarters. He hauled himself up by effort of will alone, and his knees had hit the floor before he could stop it. He clutched at the floor, panting.

_Get up, you pathetic dishrag,_ he snarled at himself. What was it Constantine had said about him? _You’re being held up by painkillers and stubbornness._ Time to dig into his last reserve of stubbornness here. It was going to take two of them to finish this work, he knew that. He made it to his feet, and reached for the sliding panel tucked to the left of his bunk. He pulled out the small silver box. 

When he made it to the front, Jordan was already deep in the hole, hair pushed out of his face, sweat chilling to icewater in the frosty air. He was struggling with a circuit connector. 

“I need your help,” Bruce said, and it was only the stubbornness that kept his eyes and voice steady as he said the four most humiliating words in his vocabulary. 

“Whatcha need?” Jordan said, hauling himself up. Bruce handed him the silver box. 

“There’s medicine in there that I need. I had hoped to avoid it, but if we’re going to survive, you need me as close to functional as possible. I need you to inject me with it.”

Jordan’s eyes were wary. “What’s in it?”

“A fast-acting high-octane steroid. I can use it about once every two weeks. For my. . . back.”

Jordan was nodding. “Okay, what do I do?”

Bruce stripped off his shirt, skin prickling in the cold. He opened the box, prepared the injection. “You’ll need to inject this as close to the spinal column as possible. You’ll need to find the bone. Think you can do that?”

“Well if you’d laid off the donuts for the last few days it mighta been easier, but yeah, I think I can manage. Turn around, lemme see what I got to work with here.”

Bruce gripped a bulkhead railing. The cold of it was bracing. Jordan was running a hand along his back, feeling for the vertebrae. If Jordan made a joke now. But he didn’t.

“You’ll need to give me some idea where,” he said quietly.

“Middle left, about five inches above my hipbone.” Jordan’s fingers brushed his hipbone to be sure of the location, then fanned out on his back, framing the injection site. 

“This is a hell of a needle. How deep do you want me to go?”

Bruce hesitated, partly because he was waiting for Jordan to make some excruciating joke, but it didn’t happen. “Sink the needle about halfway,” he said. “You won’t hurt me.”

“Yeah, sure, this isn’t gonna hurt at all,” Jordan muttered. “Okay, I think I got it. You ready?”

“Just do it.”

The needle’s slow advance burned like fire, but he didn’t even flinch. Jordan’s hand was more expert than he had thought it would be, but then he remembered some of the things in his file on Jordan, things he probably thought no one else knew, so it wasn’t such a surprise that the man knew how to work a syringe. Jordan was rubbing the spot. “Okay, done,” he said. 

Bruce straightened, pulled his shirt back on. Jordan was looking at him expectantly, still holding the syringe. “So you gonna tell me now what’s going on with you?”

Bruce snatched the needle back, replaced the syringe in its holder, and snapped the case shut. The steroid was generously laced with painkiller, thanks to Leslie, and he was feeling better already. “What’s going on with me is that I’m going to get us the hell off this rock and back to our original mission within the next twenty-four hours. And all you need to know is how best to accomplish that, and what tools to use to get this ship in the air again. My medical information is mine, not yours, and this is not special share time or an exciting new chapter in our non-existent friendship. Are we clear?”

Jordan tossed his rag onto the console. “Well fuck you too, Bats. Jesus Christ, every time I think you could not be more of a raging asshole.”

And that was the last they spoke that day. Bruce worked in determined silence on the upper panels, and Jordan worked in equal silence on the lower ones. His back was feeling so much better as the day went on that he would have been almost euphoric with it, if it weren’t for the imminent death on the horizon. He brought Jordan his power bar lunch, and was even able to bend down into the hole to hand it to him. Jordan took it without a word of thanks, but courtesy had never been the man’s strong suit.

* * *

That night there was no getting around their defeat. They had worked for as long as their oxygen would hold out, and done the best they could, but there was no denying it was not going to be good enough. They both knew it, lying in their bunks that night. They both knew that what engineering patches they had rigged were not likely to survive the steep acceleration they would need. Worse, the blips on their monitor had nearly doubled in number. There was a small swarm of warships parked in their sensor range now, and even if they could jump to speed, the likelihood of evasion had narrowed to a solid impossibility.

He could see the outline of Jordan’s knee, propped up against the side of his bunk, the bottle of Cutty Sark, dwindled to a last finger of whiskey, resting on his stomach. “This was going to be my last mission,” Bruce said, the words out of his mouth before he knew he was going to say them. He couldn’t see the twist of Jordan’s head in the dark, but he sensed it.

“What do you mean, your last mission?”

“I mean after this I quit.”

“Quit. . . going on diplomatic missions for the League?”

“No. Quit being Batman.”

He couldn’t see Jordan’s face, but it was not hard to figure out what was on it. He heard the noise of him propping up. “The fuck,” he said. “What the fuck are you talking about? Why?”

“My back,” he said, as matter-of-factly as he could. “It can’t be fixed. After Bane. . . after it was broken some years ago, it was patched together as best as anyone could manage, but it never healed, not really. I knew going into it that I would have only a few more years in the field, and then it would be time to pack it in, before I compromised the safety of others.”

“Never healed how?”

“The bone never regrew. That was always the hope, that the vertebrae would seal together. And they did, but only partially. The truth is, I’m held together with any number of steel pins and interior prosthetics, but those things have a shelf life, and after a while they deteriorate. They also cause further bone loss. Modern medicine can do a great many things, but re-grow bone from scratch is apparently not one of them. There’s nothing to be done. My time is just up.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jordan breathed. 

“Yes,” he said, and Jordan handed him the bottle. He drank deeply, finishing it off. The worst part was, it didn’t even taste bad anymore. “Anyway,” he said. “This morning. Thank you for helping me with the injection.”

“What else are non-existent friends for?”

He lay there in silence, absorbing the well-deserved reproof. He had been in pain, yes, but he had also been humiliated. Vulnerable. And in front of Jordan, of all people. It wouldn’t have bothered him so much, if it had been anyone else. Still. It said nothing good about him that his first reaction had been to lash out so viciously, and he felt the sting of shame. 

“You can’t quit,” Jordan said after a while.

“Are you under the impression this is a voluntary retirement?”

“No I mean. . . ok, maybe you don’t go out into the field, but you can’t quit being Batman. You _are_ Batman. You can still. . . I don’t know, there’s still plenty you could do for the League.”

“Oh don’t worry, I’ll still have access to my main superpower, which according to you is writing checks, so there you go.”

Silence from Jordan’s bunk. He hadn’t meant all the bitterness to leak around his voice like that. Hadn’t meant to reveal that a casual remark tossed off years ago still rankled. He was pathetic. Broken, bitter, resentful. He took a centering breath and let himself lapse into silence again. After a while he handed the empty bottle back to Jordan. 

“Look,” he said, in another voice. “This was just the price to pay, for running with gods. I never had any particular gifts other than my training, and that only gets you so far. Doing what I do, with a normal body, is not a recipe for a long and healthy life.”

“Yeah, trust me, your body is a lot of things, but normal is not among them.”

“Regardless, I had a good run. More than I thought I would get, when I started.” The platitudes he told himself in the early morning, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom. Waiting for sleep to come. 

“Fuck that,” Jordan said, and his voice sounded angry. “Seriously, fuck that. There’s no League without you in it. You _are_ the fucking League, and fuck if I want in if you’re out. What does Clark say?”

“Clark doesn’t know yet,” he said, staring at the framing above his bunk. There was the faintest reflected starlight, gleaming off the piping. 

“You’re shitting me.”

“No Jordan, I am not shitting you.”

“You’re quitting the League, quitting Batman, leaving everything, in a matter of days. . . and your best friend doesn’t know yet?”

“I was getting around to it.” 

There was a long low laugh from the other bunk. It went on for an irritating length of time. “I tell you what, Bats, you do not ever fail to disappoint,” Jordan said at last. 

Bruce turned to face him across the narrow passage between their bunks. “We get five hours of sleep,” he said. “And then you go for help. That’s the only play left, and you know it.”

“Yeah, that’s a no from me,” Jordan drawled. 

“Then you condemn us both to death by your childish unwillingness to consider alternatives. Or do you have some other play in mind here? Some genius maneuver you just haven’t shared with the class yet?”

“Actually I do,” he said. “It’s just not my favorite, so I haven’t exactly been eager to give it a try, but since it looks like we have arrived at the what-the-hell stage of this fun-filled family vacation, we are out of options. My thought is, we can always try plugging my ring into the Javelin’s mainframe and hope it’s got enough juice to take over the controls and boost us out of here.”

“Does it?”

He could see the outline of Jordan’s shrug. 

“Is this a technique you’ve seen successfully used somewhere before?”

“I mean. . . in theory it could work.”

“Meaning you’ve read about the theory, or at least heard an example of its use?”

“Look, it could work, all right? All I need to do is—”

“Jordan, on a daily basis, how many of your ideas are from a file labeled ‘space movies I once saw while high?’ Forty percent? Sixty? Ninety-five? Seriously, just ballpark me here.” 

“I mean, of the two of us, I’m the only one who actually has experience with space travel, so maybe once in a while I do actually know what I’m talking about.”

“Is this one of those times?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Okay, just checking.”

They subsided into silence. It was amazing how dark this sector of space wasn’t. Even with no lights running in the Javelin, and the tiny porthole their only window back here, there was enough starlight and reflected planetary light streaming in that he could see dim outlines of their bunks, of the two of them lying here. Strange how many odd crannies of light filled the universe. Strange that any time he chose, Jordan could go explore them all. The freedom and power of the ring were awesome to contemplate. Not for the first time he wondered what he might accomplish, with the power of that ring. After a while he turned his head on his pillow to face Jordan.

“What did you mean when you said that option wasn’t your favorite?”

Jordan sighed. “Well, the likelihood is that a power surge like that is gonna knock me into next week. And if I’m unconscious or dead, there goes our engine boost.”

“I could always just grab your ring and carry on.”

“Well you should probably make sure I’m dead first, just so there’s no confusion with the ring.”

“I’ve got a ring spanner laid by just for that. One solid blow ought to do it.” 

“Okay but if you shatter my skull, try not to mess up my face, all right? I wanna look good in my coffin.”

“Jordan, I’m not expending the unnecessary energy to haul your body back. You’re getting chucked out an airlock.”

“Sounds fair. I guess my only hope is that once I’m a space-cicle I can—” He sat up. Bruce saw it too, the blip on the external monitor. “What the. . .”

They both watched, as the dot – at least four times the size of any of the other dots – slowly advanced on their position. And then there was a ping on their long-range communications sensor. “Hailing Justice League vessel,” called the tinny universal translator voice. “Hailing Justice League vessel. This is the Andallian warship Vengeance. You need have no further concern. We have come to rescue you. Hailing Justice League vessel.”

“Well,” drawled Jordan. “Will you look at that. The cavalry has arrived. Isn’t that just the most convenient thing you ever did see.”

“How lucky for us,” Bruce said drily. 

They watched their rescuers approach. If the whole thing had been a set-up job from the beginning, it did not argue for the subtlety of the Andallian mind. He watched as the Andallian ship slid closer to the smaller warships and one by one, obliterated them. Bloodthirsty as well. 

“Welp,” Jordan said, rising and toeing the empty whiskey bottle under his bunk. “Time to go do our job I guess. Sorry you won’t get to shove me out an airlock.”

“Ah well, the mission’s young.”

“Things might look up for you yet. Come on, we gotta at least go get some replacement hooch. That material you put together on Andallia, does it say anything about what kind of liquor they drink?”

Bruce strode to the front of the Javelin and flipped the switch on their hailing translator. “Andallian warship Vengeance, this is the Justice League vessel Javelin. You are welcome to come aboard.” He flipped the switch back and glanced at Jordan, leaning against the rear bulkhead. 

“Time to get cleaned up for company.”

“Aw Mom, c’mon. I did the vacuuming last time.”

“Put on some pants while you’re at it,” he said, sliding the instrument panels to life and flipping the circuits in the cockpit.   



	4. Chapter 4

** Chapter Three: On Andallia **

None of their interactions with the Andallians did anything to dispel his initial suspicions about their convenient rescue. Their demeanor seemed to have two modes: bloodthirsty belligerence (when talking about their enemies, the Varn) or oily flattery (when talking to their peacebrokers, the League). The Andallians were hosting the peace conference, and the Varn were clearly as suspicious as Bruce about their hosts’ motivations. He couldn’t help but run the calculation – if the negotiators were assassinated, the Andallians would have pretext to launch another attack on the Varn, and the war faction would be overjoyed. Or if the peace talks stalled or failed, that could be another pretext for the war faction. 

He said as much to Jordan, in their private quarters. “Question,” Jordan said, looking up from a plate of what appeared to be chicken wings but was most likely a terrifying facsimile concocted in order to please their guests. Probably made of crushed insect wings. Jordan wiped his mouth. “So about this war faction, have you met anybody on this planet who _doesn’t_ want war? I mean, near as I can tell they’re all genocidal maniacs. Great food, though,” he said, tossing aside a wing. 

“They shoot down every concession the Varn are willing to make, which frankly is not that many.”

“Yep. This whole thing is a gigantic waste of our time,” Jordan said cheerfully, pulling the plate of fries closer.

“You seem to have made your peace with it.”

“Well we’ve got an ace in the hole. At the end of this shitshow, I’m gonna present them with a treaty, and they’re gonna sign it.”

“Or?”

“Or, the Corps posts a permanent Lantern presence.”

“Is the Corps prepared to do that?”

Jordan shrugged. He was busy dousing his fries in what looked like chili ketchup. It made Bruce’s stomach lurch to watch the man eat. “Dunno. But a bunch of Lanterns parked on their front door is the last thing these vicious little warthogs want, so they’ll cave. You sure you don’t want some of this?”

“I’m sure.” Bruce sat on the sofa, wondering how it was that every piece of furniture in this suite of rooms managed to be even more uncomfortable than standing. Or maybe it was that there was no comfortable position for his back anymore. He tried to stretch out his legs, and winced. Even the mattress in this place was carved out of rock. 

Of course, he could probably get more comfortable on the mattress if he had a little more room on it. It was not that large a bed, and for reasons that would definitely not appear in their log report back to the League, he was currently sharing that bed with Jordan. 

As soon as they had arrived on Andallia, they had been shown to this set of rooms in the royal palace. The rooms were sleek and well-appointed, with wide windows looking out over leafy arbors. “These will be the quarters of Green Lantern Hal Jordan,” their Andallian host had said, gesturing with a smooth smile. “Justice League Leader Batman will be staying on the next floor, just opposite His Excellence the Varn ambassador.”

Jordan shot him a glance, and he arched an eyebrow. “Next floor?” Jordan said. 

“Yes,” their host said, her smile widening. “Those quarters are equally satisfactory, I assure you.”

“Yeah, that’s a no. Batman and I will be staying together,” Jordan said, and the fake smile was wiped away. 

“That will not be possible,” she said. “These quarters have been carefully selected and prepared for you.”

_I’ll just bet,_ Bruce thought, but Jordan was plowing ahead. “Look, you’re just gonna have to un-prepare them then, because no way are you putting us in separate quarters. There is no way in hell that—”

“What my colleague is trying to say,” Bruce cut in, “is that shared quarters are a necessity, due to our recent marriage.”

He would have laughed aloud at the slow swivel of Lantern’s head, but he was too busy assessing the Andallian. She dropped her eyes before his level gaze. “Of course,” she said, with a bow. “I will inform my masters. I hope that your stay here is everything you would wish it to be.”

Jordan waited until the door slid shut behind her before turning to Bruce, who held up a hand for silence. Jordan sighed and twisted his ring, running a green scanning field around the room. The scanner picked up at least eight different sites that were clearly bugged. One by one, the ring incinerated them. “Okay,” Jordan said, as soon as they had the place to themselves. 

“Force field,” Bruce said. 

“What, you think they’re gonna bust in here and mow us down before negotiations even get under way?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them. Unless a force field is too complex for you to generate?”

“Such a cock-nozzle,” Jordan sighed, and with another twist of the ring the room was washed in a faint pulsing green. It soaked into the walls and was quickly invisible to the eye, but if their hosts were monitoring these quarters, they would have registered its presence as well. 

“So listen,” Jordan was saying. “About our whirlwind courtship. I know things have been crazy the last few days, and you and I have been thrown together a lot. It’s natural that you might be struggling with some confusing feelings, but it’s okay to talk about them. You don’t have to leap right to marriage in order to—”

“Will you shut up. If you had read anything about Andallian culture, you would know that their reverence for marriage is their over-riding social value. Couples in the first year of marriage are expected to be physically together at all times. It was the only excuse we could give that would save face for them, and not make it look like we don’t trust them.”

“We don’t trust them, and the sooner they know that the better.”

“You have all the diplomatic delicacy of a nuclear warhead. We need them to believe that we are at least a little fooled by their façades.”

“Why?”

“Because it might be useful to us,” he said. He was examining the paneling in the walls, trying to determine their understructure. It was the same smooth blank material that had lined the interior of the ship that had brought them here.

“Uh huh. You know what’s not useful to us, is having to go everywhere together now. We might need to split up at some point, and your little marriage stunt just made that impossible, according to Andallian expectations.”

“Yes, it was a calculated decision, but preferable to being murdered in our beds. You couldn’t have extended this force field over two non-contiguous spaces, and this was the best I could come up with on short notice. You’re welcome.”

Jordan crossed his arms. “How do you know I couldn’t?”

“Observation. I’ve never seen you do that, so I assumed the ring wasn’t capable of splitting its power that way. Am I wrong?”

“For your information yes.”

Bruce turned from his examination of the walls and frowned at him. Jordan sighed. “Okay, fine, you’re not wrong. I just wanted to see your face when someone told you you were wrong about something.”

“Congratulations, you’re four.” There were seams and joints lurking just beneath his fingers, but he couldn’t discover any mechanism by which they were connected. It was all as smooth as shark skin.

The mattress, on the other hand, appeared to be made of sharks’ teeth, it was so uncomfortable. There was only the one bed in the place, and it was none too large. There was, however, a sofa in the living area, and their first night on Andallia, Bruce made to bed down on it. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jordan had said sharply. 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean like hell are you putting that back on that sofa. The Andallians might not yet have discovered memory foam technology – and by the way, explain to me a society that has invented interplanetary space travel before they have gotten around to inventing the basic pillow, for fuck’s sake – but that mattress is at least better than this sofa, which is like, three boards with a piece of cloth stretched over it. Come on, get your ass in the bed.”

Jordan’s assessment was in fact correct, so he didn’t argue. He would be no use to their mission if he could barely walk tomorrow. He grabbed a blanket and stumbled to the bed. And then Jordan made to get in next to him. “What are you doing?” Bruce said. 

“What does it look like I’m doing, I’m getting in bed.” 

Bruce glared at him, and Jordan’s eyebrows went up. “Are you shitting me, you’re refusing to share? Come on, this bed is plenty big enough for the both of us. I’m not a cuddler, I swear.” 

“We could alternate,” Bruce said. “One night on the sofa, one night on the bed.”

“Look, can we talk about this in the morning? I promise I will listen to all the toxic masculine bullshit you want to spout, just as soon as I get an actual night’s sleep. All right?”

And then of course he couldn’t protest further, because Jordan wanted to make this about homophobia, which it emphatically was not. Good Christ, how could one human person be so consistently and constantly irritating? Bruce pulled the thin blankets tighter around him, and wondered if he was just imagining that it had gotten colder in their rooms since earlier. 

Sleep eluded him, unsurprisingly. He lay there in the dark that first night, cursing the spasms of pain running up and down his back. His fists were clenched beside him. 

“Hey,” came Jordan’s quiet voice. “Anything I can do to help?”

Bruce shook his head. He turned his head to the wall so that if there were tears, Jordan wouldn’t see them. He was in fairly tight control of his pain responses, but that one had been known to happen, at night especially. When his guard was down. 

“What about a good old-fashioned massage?”

“Leave me alone,” he said, more harshly than he had intended. He got up and pulled the packet of meds from the inside pocket of his case in the corner of the room, and swallowed a handful dry. He leaned his head against the wall. God, for five minutes to himself. He was going to come unglued if he had to spend the next ten days or so like this. First the Javelin, now this. But there had been no help for it. 

Bruce turned to head back to the bed, and the nerve pain shot down his leg like an electric jolt, unstringing the muscles and knocking him to the floor. He just crumpled like a rag doll – or would have, had he not been instantaneously wrapped in green bands that held him, gently securing him. “Hey,” Jordan was saying. He had leaped up, had a hand on Bruce’s back. “Hey, hey, let’s get you back to bed all right? Come on, lemme help, the world is not gonna come to an end if someone has to help you, okay? Unclench for fucking once. Hey, come on, I got you.”

He had no choice but to let Jordan help him back to the bed. He gave a small moan as his back adjusted to the flat surface, and turned his head away in shame. Jordan released the green supports, and slid quietly into the bed on the other side. He could practically hear the man thinking beside him, as he tried to come up with something to say. Some brainless platitude. Would the Andallians mind if he cudgeled his negotiating partner to death? They would probably be overjoyed. 

“They know you’re injured,” was what Jordan said, and Bruce froze at that. The Andallians did not have medical scanning technology, his research had turned up nothing like that. 

“Why do you say that?”

“The environmentals,” Jordan said, and he was right, goddamn but he was right. Bruce hated him for being right. Every other room in this building was at least ten degrees warmer than their quarters. They knew what cold did to his muscles. It was a small calculated torture. A retaliation for the room situation. 

“I couldn’t have done this on the Javelin,” Jordan said, propping up. “We couldn’t risk the Lantern signature. But I can help now.”

“Help how?”

Before the words were all the way out of his mouth, he felt the warmth. He was being wrapped in soft green blankets, and they were warm. They were so warm. He could feel the muscles of his back slowly relax. The heat would even seep down into his spine, maybe give him a few hours of blessed relief. He tried not to sink into it. “You can’t—do that,” Bruce said.

“And why’s that?”

“Because you need to sleep too.”

“So I’ll take first watch. I’m too wired to sleep anyway. You get some rest, okay?”

Bruce kept his head turned away. The shame was even stronger this time. “Hal,” he said softly. 

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

There was a hand that clasped his, just briefly. Bruce clasped it back, held it for a moment. “When we get back,” he said. 

“Yeah?” 

“Please give me time to talk to Clark. To figure out how my exit is going to go. I can’t. . . think about it right now.”

“Bruce. Jesus Christ. Take all the time you want. Did you think I would ever tell anybody?”

He thought about that one. “No,” he said. “I don’t, actually.”

The hand gave his another squeeze. That was the last thing he knew before he slipped into a sleep so complete, so obliterating, that he didn’t wake for a solid twelve hours. When his eyes slowly opened to the light of the Andallian suns streaming in through the window, he was still wrapped in green, still cocooned in warmth. 

“Goddammit, Jordan!” he said, kicking off his covers. The green fell away. Jordan was in the glass cubicle of the shower, and he stormed in. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” he shouted over the water. 

Jordan’s back was to him. “What crawled up your ass this morning?” he said, as he rinsed off.

“You were supposed to take first watch, not the whole night. All you’ve done now is render yourself incapable of functioning today, which is the first day we sit down at a table with both the Andallians and the Varn. And thanks to your little stunt, I will be minus any back-up, since you’re going to be unconscious before noon.”

“First off,” Jordan said, and he shut off the water. He opened the door of the shower and stepped out, grabbing a towel and scrubbing at his face. “First off, I am completely functional for up to thirty-eight hours of no sleep, which is something you’re just gonna have to trust me on. And second, I did not take the whole night – I slept in two-hour stretches, which was about the length of time I discovered it takes your back to start spasming again in the cold. So I actually did get plenty of sleep, because I did a two hours on, two hours off drill, which seemed to work fine for both of us. And third, speaking of functional, I needed _you_ functional today, so letting you sleep was a totally reasonable decision to make.”

“It was not your decision to make,” he said through clenched teeth. 

“Oh is that so? Well here’s a newsflash for you, I don’t need you to sign off on any fucking decision I make out here, because space is my territory, not yours, and when I make a decision you shut the fuck up and deal with it, so get off my dick you giant ungrateful whiny-ass man-baby.”

He tossed the towel on the floor and pushed past Bruce. His shoulder knocked Bruce’s. They were both on edge. This was now their fifth day of shared space, and they were about ready to claw each other’s eyes out. Bruce had a brief flickering fantasy of sharing this mission with Diana. Even Clark – at least the two of them knew how to stay out of each other’s way. Or Barry. Arthur, even, God help him. Literally anyone else. 

He followed Jordan into the bedroom, where he was slipping on his clothes. “This is not a Green Lantern mission,” he said, as calmly as he could manage. “This is a Justice League mission. And you might be a commander in the Corps, but here you and I are a team, and when we make decisions we make them together.”

“That’s not what has your ass chapped,” Jordan said, pulling up his pants. “What’s got your nuts in a sling is that someone did something nice for you, and holy shit does that ever make you mad. You must be a real treat in bed, I can tell already. Someone sucks your cock you probably gotta punch them in the face for about five minutes afterward, am I right? I’m betting that’s the real reason Selina dumped your ass.”

His shot across Jordan’s jaw was clean and true, with all the considerable force in his arm, and too quick for the man even to block. It had him down in one blow, staggering into the bed. Bruce hadn’t even been aware he was going to do it until he looked down and saw his clenched fist. It would have been more satisfying – and slightly less painful – in the gauntlet, but what was done was done. 

Jordan was sitting on the bed. He was touching his hand to his face, and his hand came away blood. “Motherfucker,” he muttered, looking at his hand. And then he gave a laugh. 

“Dammit,” Bruce sighed, and strode into the bathroom, wetted a cloth in cool water, and brought it back to him. Jordan took it. He was still laughing a little.

“Okay, that was fair,” he said, voice muffled through the cloth. 

“Nonetheless,” Bruce said. 

“You realize what this means,” Jordan said. 

“That we are two people with massive interpersonal issues, who most assuredly should not be spending days on end in each other’s company?”

“This means that at some point when you’re least expecting it, I am totally gonna deck you.”

“I mean, you can try.”

Jordan gave another laugh. They sat on the edge of the bed together. At least Jordan had put some clothes on. 

“That’s not why,” Bruce finally said. 

“That’s not why what?”

“That’s not why she dumped me.”

Jordan took the cloth down, dabbed at his face. He examined the cloth. “Bruce,” he said. “Selina dumped you for one simple reason, and that reason is the reason that everyone but you has always known, which is that she is a complete and total cunt. That’s the whole reason right there. Look at that, I saved you hours of therapy.”

Bruce changed out his cloth for him, and they sat in silence for a while more. It was the nearest they had yet come to a companionable silence. “Come on,” Jordan sighed. “Let’s go do the job we came here to do. The sooner we get these assholes to sign a treaty, the sooner we can all go home, right?”

“You want some painkillers?”

“I dunno, you got anything good?”

Bruce reached into his case and pulled out the packet with the meds. “I’m a walking pharmacy,” he said. “Go wild.”

“Goddamn Spooky you got the good stuff, don’t you? Well, at least one of us should probably not be baked out of our mind today, so I’ll stick with one Oxy and call it a day. That’s quite the hook you got. You go to the gym or something?” 

“I do all right,” he said. Jordan knocked back the meds and went to the bathroom to finish getting ready, and that was that. What a strange interaction. Possibly he should have decked the man years ago; it might have done wonders for their relationship. Then again, he knew Jordan well enough to know that he was absolutely not kidding about decking him right back when he was least expecting it. Well, fair was fair.


	5. Chapter 5

** Chapter Four **

Somehow, through a combination of threats, cajoling, and outright bribery, they got their treaty signed. The Varn would not suffer further attacks and could have a chance to rebuild their world; the Andallians agreed to constrain their territorial ambitions; and the Justice League had burnished their reputation as fair and impartial negotiators in intergalactic crises. Of course, that reputation was both a good and a bad thing. There was an argument to be made that anything that drew intergalactic attention their way was not a good thing. There was another argument to be made that intergalactic attention, given the richness and biodiversity of their planet, was unavoidable, and a muscular League presence was the best way to defend Earth. He knew all the arguments, because he had made them over and over to himself, turning them this way and that, and some days he thought one thing, and other days, he thought another. 

But on this day, the League (in the persons of Batman and the Green Lantern) had done good work, and after all they had been through, it was cause for celebration. 

“Well, we did it,” Jordan said, after the eleventh day of negotiations. He deposited a bottle on the table in front of their board-sofa. “And behold our reward: Andallian elkoth.”

“Andallian what?”

“Well turns out all that cultural material you prepared for us to study had some gaps in it, so I did a little research of my own, and today I sneaked off to the market down in the village and bought us a bottle of what appears to be their finest concoction.” Jordan pulled out the cork and gave it a sniff. “Kinda like brandy, I’d say.”

Bruce leaned in to smell it. He grimaced. “That’s brandy in the sense that Cutty Sark is whiskey. Jordan, your palate is for shit.”

“Aw, see, you’re just saying that because you know I can drink you under the table any day of the week, and you don’t wanna embarrass yourself.”

“Drink _me_ under the table, are you serious?” 

Hal produced two glasses from the side of the sofa and plunked them down in front of him. “I am serious as a heart attack. Come on, we saved the universe, or at least this corner of it. For today. For a few hours, anyway. It’s cause for celebration.”

“Any chance you checked this bottle for poisoning agents?”

“I bet you check your kids’ Halloween candy for weed and razor blades too. Come on, yes, of course I scanned it. Knock it back, Spooky.” He poured a finger in each glass, and raised his. Bruce picked his up, with reluctance. 

“To – what are we toasting to?” Jordan said.

“To going home,” Bruce said. That made him think about the upcoming conversation with Clark, with Diana, with Dick and everyone else. With Alfred. The reckoning he had so long delayed. He closed his eyes and knocked back the alcohol. It was surprisingly pleasant. A plum brandy, was the nearest analogue he could think of. Brandy, but with a bit more of a kick. “Not bad,” he said.

“Whoa be careful there Spooky, you might be close to complimenting me for something. Re-lubricate.” Jordan poured their second glass, and Bruce knocked that one back as efficiently as the first. He poured a third.

“I have three questions,” Bruce said.

“About the elkoth, or about Andallia?”

“About you.”

“Better and better, hit me. Come on, come at me.”

“Will you tell the truth?”

“Probably. Okay, yes, definitely. If I can. Wait, what kind of questions?”

“Yes or no questions. I promise to keep it simple, no overly taxing sentence structure.”

“Okay, just for that, I get three questions too.”

“Mine first,” Bruce said. “The other day, after I hit you. Did you not hit me back because you were worried about hurting my back?”

Hal was leaning back against the sofa, squinting at the ceiling. “Huh,” he said. “I dunno. Maybe. Mainly you just surprised the shit out of me. I really didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Had what in me?”

“Honesty.”

“You know the trouble with you, Jordan,” Bruce said. He held his glass to the light, studied the room through its amber glow. 

“Oh I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”

“The trouble with you is, you confuse self-restraint with dishonesty. If I have an emotion or a thought that I don’t immediately burble out, I’m not being dishonest, I’m being an adult.”

“You know what’s funny?”

“What.”

“You have never had a job that your family didn’t give you, you live in your mom and dad’s house, and you’ve never had to figure out how to feed and clothe yourself or any of your family. You live swaddled in this billionaire fantasy land that has like, zero intersection points with actual people’s actual lives, and yet you fucking dare sit there and condescend to me about the real meaning of adulthood or some shit like that.”

Bruce knocked back some more of the elkoth, finishing off his glass. “You think money has insulated me from an actual life,” he said slowly. “Or actual problems.” 

“A little, yeah.”

He thought of Jason, of holding his broken bloodied body in the snow. Watching his blood stain and melt the snow, because it was still so hot. Of Dick. Of Damian, and the yawning hellmouth that was the time of his absence. Of all the blood and death, so much of it his fault. “Well lucky you,” he said lightly, “that all of the problems in your life can be solved by money. Also, next time you open your mouth to tell me what I don’t understand about actual life, you should remember that one of us has four children and one of us has, on a good day, a houseplant he can barely keep alive.”

Bruce poured himself more elkoth. “And I already know your answer to that,” he said. 

“Oh you do.”

“You want to say, on a good day I can barely keep my children alive. Now who’s got more honesty.”

Jordan was still lying there sprawled back on the sofa, studying the ceiling. “You know what, Bats? I am coming to the conclusion you actually and for real do not know jack shit about me.”

Bruce leaned back against the sofa too, and settled in like Jordan had. From this angle the sofa was actually not so terrible. Or maybe the elkoth was just making him think that. Jordan’s reproof was justified. Jordan wasn’t the one who said those things, or even thought them, probably. He was. They were the things he thought every minute of every day. 

“I can’t actually keep plants alive,” Jordan said after a few minutes. Bruce laughed softly. 

“Me either.” He leaned forward and refilled Jordan’s glass. “Come on, drink up, I’m a drink ahead of you. Your plan to drink me under the table is not going so well.”

“All right, all right, keep your pants on. I’m playing the long game here. And you’ve still got questions you wanna ask me, so I figure I should stay a little sober.”

“Right,” Bruce said. “Well actually I don’t remember them. No wait, I remember one.”

Jordan knocked back another finger of the liquor and made a lordly gesture. “Then hit me,” he said.

“On the Javelin,” Bruce said. “You said something strange.”

“Probably.”

“You said. . . I was talking about doing what I do with a normal body. And you said trust me, your body is a lot of things, but normal is not one of them.”

“Mm hm.”

“Did you mean that to sound like it sounded?”

Jordan turned his head on the cushion to stare blearily at Bruce. “Probably not,” he said. “How did it sound?”

“Oddly sexual.”

“Oh then yes, I definitely did.” He gave a lopsided grin. “I like that you remember exactly what I said.”

“It’s a reflex. A thing my brain does.”

“What is?”

“Remembering things people have said. Exactly the words they’ve used. When I was young, after my parents died, Alfred put me in this school. It was. . . strange to me. Children my age were. . . strange. I couldn’t quite figure out what they meant, when they said things. So I started keeping journals. I wrote down everything people said, snatches of dialogue, conversations, anything. It trained me to remember things. It taught me how to talk to people, to talk like one of them.”

“Yeah that’s. . . not normal. You realize you are like, autistic as fuck, right?”

Bruce shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I mean yes, there are some areas of overlap, but that’s not my actual diagnosis.”

“What is your actual diagnosis?”

“Bipolar. With manifestations of paranoia.”

“Yeah,” Jordan said softly. “I saw some of those meds. You doing okay these days?”

“Some days are better than others. But if you mean, am I better now than I was when I was younger, the answer is definitely yes.”

“I’m glad.” 

“Me too.” He drank some more elkoth. Another thing not to look at – what quitting Batman would mean. More than the meds, more than anything, being Batman had always been his best and only way to fight the demons trying to claw at his flesh. What would happen when he was no longer Batman, and all the demons came home to roost? _You *are* Batman_, was another thing Jordan had said to him. But what did that even mean? 

“Hey Bruce,” Jordan said. He was struggling to sit up now, putting his glass on the table. “Let’s celebrate.”

“I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“Not yet. But we can, if that’s something you might like.”

There was no mistaking what Jordan meant. His brain flashed on his old notebooks, the journals he used to keep. There had been a special header, Sexual Nuance. That section had required particular study. “All right,” he said. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

“Excellent,” Jordan said. He raised a hand to Bruce’s face, and brushed it with the back of his hand. Brushed a finger along his jawline. “Come on, baby, come on back to my place.”

“I don’t know. Is it very far away? I need to be at work in the morning.” 

“It’s right close by, I swear.” And then Jordan’s face was closer. Looming over him. Jordan was going to kiss him. He had a hard jolt of sobriety, seeing that. Jordan must have seen something on his face, because he stopped. “Hey,” he said, in another voice. The hand brushed his face again. A thumb against the stubble on his jaw. “Is this okay, gorgeous?”

Bruce nodded. He was curious to see what kind of a kisser Jordan would be. 

Surprising, was his assessment. He had thought Jordan’s kiss would be as straightforward and brash as the man himself, but it. . . wasn’t, somehow. He had just assumed Jordan would be of the “crawl on top of you and stick his tongue down your throat” school of making out, but he very much was not. It was a gentle kiss, a kiss that felt its way. He kept his hand on Bruce’s face. 

Bruce mirrored his gesture, sliding his hand to Jordan’s face and pulling him closer. It was a delicious kiss. He felt Jordan’s breathing quicken, and wasn’t that interesting. What had made him say _all right_? It wasn’t something he had contemplated before. Maybe it was something his brain had been quietly mulling since he had seen Jordan naked in the shower. But no, that wasn’t it – he had certainly seen Jordan naked in the locker room on the Watchtower before. Mainly it was curiosity on his part. Maybe he had wanted to see if Jordan would back down. 

It occurred to him Jordan’s gentleness might be because of his back. So he kissed him more aggressively, wondering if Jordan would follow his lead, and he did. Interesting. Bruce broke off their kiss, and was surprised to find himself out of breath. His heart was hammering. He stood, held out his hand. “Come on,” he said, and Jordan let himself be led to the bedroom. 

Bruce pulled him close once they were there, kissed him again. Jordan was letting himself be kissed, letting Bruce set the pace. He tilted his head back and Bruce cradled his head. He wondered if Jordan thought he was inexperienced in sex with men. But no, probably not – probably Jordan would not have made that pass otherwise. He let his mouth slide to Jordan’s jaw, to his neck. Jordan made a small sound, something quieter than a moan. It was a sound that went straight to Bruce’s cock. He let his hand travel to Jordan’s ass, pulled him in even closer. Jordan was rock hard already, which was another interesting fact. Bruce let his own erection press against Jordan’s, and this time the sound Jordan made was louder. 

“Clothes off,” Bruce murmured, pushing at Jordan’s shirt. Jordan’s fingers were fumbling with Bruce’s shirt. They were halfway unclothed when Jordan seized Bruce’s face in his hands and started kissing him again. So here was a thought: there was absolutely no lube anywhere. It wasn’t as though he had thrown some in his suitcase, when he had packed for this mission. He doubted Jordan had any either. And there was nothing in their rooms here they could use. Lubeless penetration might have been possible, were either of them built a bit differently. So they would have to be inventive. Jordan was pushing him back onto the bed, his kisses hungrier now. Bruce pushed down his pants, got his hands on that glorious ass. Jordan groaned at it. 

They were grinding more or less naked now, and Bruce let his hands explore: the long muscled expanse of Jordan’s back, the perfect swell of his ass. It was not an easy ass to keep one’s hands off, when it came down to it. He rolled them so he was the one on top, and let himself grind on Jordan for a bit. He watched Jordan’s neck as he swallowed, gasped. 

“Good?” Bruce whispered. 

“Yes,” he whispered back. 

Bruce smiled. “I can make it better,” he said. He pulled off the last of Jordan’s clothes, contemplated his cock. Formidable. Full hard now, even leaking a bit. Another surprising thing – he very much wanted to taste it. Needed to taste it. He wondered what noises Jordan would make if he put his mouth on that cock. Only one way to find out, really. 

He bent his mouth to Jordan’s cock and let his lips slide as far down the shaft as he could, stroking him with his tongue. “Bruce,” Jordan gasped, and he writhed on the bed a little. “Oh fuck,” he moaned, his hands gripping Bruce’s shoulder. He could feel him shaking a little, underneath him. Bruce let his tongue get bolder, licked him up and down. Closed his mouth around him and sucked, and at that the noise Jordan made was a strangled sound. Suddenly Bruce wanted him to cum in his mouth. Wondered if he would. 

“Bruce, Jesus Christ, gorgeous, you gotta stop,” Jordan said hoarsely. 

“Mm?” Bruce said. “Why is that?” He let his hands stray to Jordan’s balls, taut now, heavy. Jordan writhed some more. Even more interesting. He put his mouth back on his cock. His mouth was salty with pre-cum now, as Jordan leaked some more. 

“I’m gonna—fuck I’m gonna cum,” Jordan said weakly. Bruce sucked harder, using his hand to supplement his mouth, travel the length of the shaft. Jordan was thrusting up now, his breathing loud. Idly Bruce brushed a finger down his crack, gave him a bit of pressure at his hole, and Jordan’s noise now was a shameless moan. Liked that, did he. 

“No lube,” Bruce whispered, lifting his mouth for a second. 

“Fuck, fuck I—_fuck_,” was all Jordan could say, as he quivered and shook, and he was cumming in Bruce’s mouth then. Bruce pressed with his tongue, swallowed him harder. Another shudder took him, and there was more cum in his mouth. Slowly he licked and gentled him down from it. Jordan was gasping like a fish. “Fuck,” he said again, weakly. Bruce mouthed his balls a bit, gave a lick to the inside of his thigh. He had not expected every part of the man to taste quite this delicious. He crawled back up and flopped down beside him. Jordan turned his head to Bruce’s and they just watched each other. He had never seen Jordan’s eyes so naked. 

“That was fucking amazing,” Jordan whispered, his tongue still thick. Something crunched Bruce’s chest, some tenderness he hadn’t known was lurking there. He wanted to kiss him again, but he did have a mouth that reeked of cum. Didn’t seem to bother Jordan, who propped up and leaned to Bruce’s mouth, kissing him, pulling him closer. Jordan’s hands were the ones going exploring now. 

“Hal,” he whispered. 

“Yeah?”

“I’m on. . . quite a bit of meds.” 

Jordan pulled back, stroked at his face again. Those eyes. Like he could see right to the back of him. Like Jordan’s eyes were seeing just as deep in him. _You actually and for real do not know jack shit about me_, Jordan had said, and maybe there was some truth in that. “So tell me what feels good to you,” he said gently, still stroking Bruce’s face. “Or do you want me to stop?”

Bruce shook his head. “Don’t stop touching me,” was what tumbled out of his mouth, words he didn’t know he was going to say, words that were more naked than he wanted to be. 

“Baby,” Hal murmured in response, and his mouth was back on Bruce’s. 

There were parts of that night he did not actually remember. It could be that it was the Andallian alcohol, because there was no question that Bruce could hold his liquor, and for all Jordan’s evident capacity, he knew he could in fact drink him under the table. So maybe there was something different about the Andallian brandy, or maybe – and more likely – it was just that he was on fistfuls of painkillers. He had avoided sex for most of the past year. His body wasn’t trustworthy on the meds, and while erection (blessedly) was not a problem, orgasm most definitely was. 

But Jordan seemed untroubled by that possibility. He caressed, and stroked, and kissed, and his hands were everywhere, but with no real objective in sight other than touching. They dozed off and on through the night, and Jordan was wrapped around him almost every time he awoke. Toward dawn, or what felt like dawn, Jordan’s fingers were on his cock, just stroking gently. “You know your cock is fucking gorgeous, right,” Jordan husked in his ear. “If we had some lube, Jesus Christ, I would want this to fuck me.”

Bruce shivered at that. “You like that?” Jordan whispered. There was a finger that traveled up and down his shaft. He had been hard for hours, he was aching with it. But Jordan’s finger didn’t speed up, didn’t press harder. He crawled a bit closer, pressed his mouth to Bruce’s ear. 

“Let me tell you what I want that cock to do to me,” he murmured, and he spilled such delicious filth into Bruce’s ear that his cock dripped with it, his balls pulsed. And every time Jordan said _fuck_ in that particular low timbre, his cock gave another throb. His orgasm was slow, so slow he could almost not get his breath. Jordan’s finger was gentle and relentless at the same time, only now it was his whole hand. His orgasm unstrung him, the slow build of it, the wave after wave of it. Afterward Jordan licked his hand. Bruce struggled to breathe. Jordan nuzzled at his face. 

“Hal,” was all he could say. A hoarse broken sound. He leaned his forehead against Hal’s. He must have fallen back asleep that way, because he woke once more and found they were still in the same position, Jordan’s arm draped heavily across him. And then he woke again, and it was light, and the bed was empty, and he could hear the shower. 

He rolled over, testing his back. Surprisingly not terrible. 

He got up and swallowed some meds just in case, and went into the bathroom, still yawning. He was naked, but he supposed that wasn’t such a concern anymore. Jordan was humming merrily to himself in the shower, and Bruce smiled at it. He pissed and brushed his teeth, splashing some water on his face. 

“Hey guess what,” Jordan called from the shower.

“What?”

“We go home today.”

“Thank every god on every planetary system in the known universe,” he said, scrubbing at his face with a towel. 

“Right?” Jordan shut off the shower, grabbed for a towel. “You wanna know something even better?”

“What’s that?” 

“I got a message from the Corps about an hour ago. I’ve got a posting over in Epsilon quadrant. Supposed to report within four hours.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not even,” he said cheerfully. “Please shoot me in the face.” He tucked the towel around his waist and stepped out. “Think you can take the Javelin home on your own? It’s probably faster for me if I just warp on out from here, instead of heading back Earthside.”

“Assuming the Andallians haven’t sabotaged my ship.”

“Your ship,” Jordan snorted. “Relax, I scanned the fuck out of her yesterday, but I’ll give her another go before we head out, don’t worry. Much as I’d love to score some more of that elkoth before we go, I guess I’d better not show up to my post actually toting alcohol. Though Kilowogg would love a bottle of that,” he mused. 

“Did we finish that one?”

Jordan was pulling on clothes now, giving his hair a last scrub. “Ah, yeah, we actually did, why, were you hoping for breakfast?”

Bruce gave a laugh, and Jordan met his eyes then, and for a minute those eyes were as warm and naked as they had been last night. For a half second it flashed across his brain that sleeping with Jordan might be a thing he would want to do again. Jordan grinned at him, like he knew exactly what Bruce was thinking.

“All right,” Jordan said. “Back to the real world, I guess.”


	6. Chapter 6

** Chapter Five **

And that was that. 

Bruce went back to his investigations in Gotham, after making a full report to the League on their activities on Andallia. His report to the full League was not a detailed one, and it emphasized what they had managed to accomplish. It was only in his private meeting with Clark and Diana that he expressed the graver of his reservations, about the long-term prospects of containing the Andallians to their system. Clark was especially troubled by reports that the Varn had not agreed to destroy their weapons stockpile.

“With the Andallians as neighbors, I can’t say I blame them,” Bruce remarked. 

Diana was thoughtful. “Do you think it is actually the case that the Andallians hired mercenaries to bring down the Javelin, just so they could rescue you?”

“I don’t know. Lantern and I were both suspicious, from the beginning. And yet we met with no violence at their hands. Well,” he said, thinking about those turned-down environmentals in their quarters. “Nothing overtly hostile, let’s put it that way. But we do have reason to think they have access to technology they haven’t disclosed to anyone.”

She frowned. “Such as?”

“For one thing, neither Lantern’s ring nor my cursory examination could figure out what sort of material they build their ships out of. It’s the same material covering the interior of several rooms of the palace, including the one we stayed in. I’m not suggesting it’s anything bad, I’m just saying, it’s a sign that they have tech no one really knows about. Definitely far beyond Varn capability.”

Clark was frowning too. “We can’t get drawn into being intergalactic policemen,” he said. “Can you report your suspicions to the Corps, and let them take it from there?”

“That’s what Lantern has done, but without a permanent Lantern presence there, there’s little they can do.”

“Perhaps the Corps should think about a permanent presence,” Diana said.

“He’s going to try to persuade them of that. But I gather the Corps’ resources are stretched thin at the moment. Also you were the one who wanted us to be a part of this peace negotiation to begin with,” he said to Clark. “Singing an isolationist song is not very helpful now.”

“I know, I know,” he sighed, crossing his arms. They were still in the League’s giant conference room after the larger meeting, just the three of them propped against the table. _Oh look, it’s the Star Chamber,_ Lantern had said once, walking in to find the three of them conferring. 

_I’m impressed that you know what that is,_ Bruce had said.

_What, you think I don’t watch old movies?_ At the time Bruce had just rolled his eyes. More of Lantern’s illiteracy, was all he had thought. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He had seen things in the Andallian negotiations that had him thinking – seen enough to know that Lantern’s brashness often masked a quiet watchfulness. He might have a shoot-from-the-hip reputation, but that was all it was, was a carefully cultivated reputation. And sometimes Lantern pretended not to know things that he in fact knew, if it served him. 

“You look like you’re a million miles away,” Diana said. “You must be exhausted.”

“I am. Neither of us slept very well on Andallia, I will say.” And now would have been the time to mention how hard it was to sleep because of the cold, but that might have led to talking about his back, and he didn’t need to do anything to encourage Clark to scan him, which the man would do at the drop of a hat, he knew. Even if he pretended to be remorseful afterward. 

“Still,” Clark was saying with a grin. “Two solid weeks in Lantern’s company? I definitely expected one of you to come back dragging the other’s body behind you. Look at how much progress you’ve made.”

Bruce gave a thin smile. “I won’t say no to about twenty-four hours to myself,” was all he said. 

Back in Gotham, he picked up the pieces of a number of investigations he had running. Fortunately none of them required much fieldwork, or at least, not the kind of fieldwork that required much in terms of Batman. He spent most of the next few weeks at a computer screen, tracking his targets – financials, shipments, correlating past activity with current activity. It was interesting investigative work, but nothing that required him to put on the suit. 

He could go to Dick, and ask for his help. Dick would be sympathetic, would be a listening ear. But Dick would never, not in a million years, take on the mantle. He had made that clear, for years now, and Bruce had respected that. Would Jason give up his life and his methods? Never. Tim would reject the idea as soundly as Dick; it had always been the investigative side of things Tim had truly loved, and for all the combat skill he had acquired, it was never his real love. That was the secret of Batman, of course, the dark secret that lurked at the heart of the whole enterprise. Because you had to love the investigation, yes, and you had to love the thrill of the intellectual chase, but you also had to love the fight. You had to crave it, deep in your bones. You had to be hungry for it. Jason was hungry for it, like he was. But Jason’s hunger for violence was too raw, his disdain for the long slow tedium of investigation too great. Damian – yes, in time. In ten years, maybe. 

The truth was, Barbara was the closest to being prepared to take on the mantel. A mind that matched his own, a combat skill more deadly every passing year. She could possibly be persuaded – at the cost of his friendship with Jim Gordon, he knew. Jim would never forgive him. Would never agree to work with his daughter in that capacity, and Batman could only work if the Gotham PD were not a sworn enemy. There was such a thing as fighting a battle on too many fronts, and Batman needed the PD as an ally, not another obstacle.

Over and over his brain revolved the possibilities. Over and over, in the weeks that followed Andallia, he lay awake in the dark and thought about the disintegration of his life’s work, and then got up in the morning and plodded away at that life’s work, inch by painful inch. 

“How has the pain been?” Leslie asked him, at his check-up. 

“Manageable,” he said. 

“That’s surprising,” she said, flipping the stitch on his MRI scans. “Because this is telling me a very different story.”

He sat on the exam room table in silence, studying the scans. He knew every millimeter of what his last scans had looked like. He knew what story these were telling. “We’re going to have to talk about surgery,” she said, and he hated the gentleness in her voice. He knew what surgery she meant – the surgery that would remove his disintegrating bone and replace it with further prosthetics. The pain would probably be gone, but so would his mobility, because no spinal prosthetics could give him the range of motion he currently had. He would be sidelined forever. The truth is, by the time they were done, he would probably be in a wheelchair. He could see that on the scans as clearly as she could. He studied the slick metal of the table. 

“At a certain point,” she was saying, “I’m going to insist that we move to surgery. At a certain point, it becomes medically irresponsible to keep feeding you painkillers when the obvious solution is available to us. Your body can withstand a lot, Bruce, but this it cannot.”

“I know,” he said. And he did know. Everything she was saying was correct. She had been far more patient and understanding with his need to wait than he had expected. 

“One month,” he said. “Can you give me one more month. I need to bring some investigations to a close, I need to—” He bowed his head. “There are things I need to take care of.”

“Have you talked to the League yet?”

“I’ve talked to some of the League,” he said, because that was strictly speaking true. 

“Good. All right, let’s say one month then,” she said briskly, and he watched as she rewrote the scrips. She handed them to him, and her eyes were searching. “You know I would only pull the plug if I saw no other options,” she said, in a different voice.

“I know that.” 

She looked like she wanted to say more, but bedside manner and soothing talk had never been her long suit, and he was grateful for that. He took the scrips and left her offices in Gotham General, and sat in his car for a long time afterward. Sat there until the autumn chill began to work its way inside his car, and then he cranked the engine and sped home. He would talk to Alfred that night. Alfred knew most of it, but he had hidden the details from him, and Alfred would be angry about that. Justifiably so. He wondered what Alfred would do if he bent his head to Alfred’s chest and sobbed, like he had as a boy. _Tell me what to do,_ he wanted to say. _Tell me who I even am anymore._ And Alfred would gather him in his arms and say, _my sweet brave boy,_ just like he used to. 

And two weeks after his appointment with Leslie, Lantern walked into the Cave. 

He had seen the blip on his perimeter sensors, of course, but he was at a sensitive point in his investigation – evaluating and comparing voicemaps – and it required all his attention. So he didn’t look up when Lantern came in, even when he pulled up a chair and plopped himself next to Bruce’s work station – a mild irritant, but one he was willing to ignore. 

“Fun time in the Epsilon Quadrant?” Bruce murmured, not taking his eyes off the voicemaps.

“Oh, the best. Almost as much shits and giggles as Andallia, which speaking of, I’m guessing you haven’t heard the news.”

“What news?” He turned his head to Lantern. The man looked as well-rested and clean-shaven as ever, which had been another thing that had irritated him on their mission together – the way Lantern never showed any outward signs of physical stress, his face always the same bland cheerful expression as ever. It was like the man wanted to be punched in the face, but that was one he had already ticked off the bucket list. 

“Oh, you’ll love this,” Jordan said, stretching his hands behind his head and making himself comfortable. “The Varn have launched an invasion.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not even. What was that, like a record three weeks they lasted? Totally overran Andallia, too. Except not entirely because as it turns out the Andallians have been trading weapons and tech with some very shady characters over closer to Lantern space—”

“Hah,” Bruce said. 

“Exactly, so there’s a significant portion of the planet that’s resisting and armed with enough weapons to incinerate the entire quadrant of the galaxy, so that’s fun. Anyway, the good news is that open war is reason enough for the Corps to pay attention, so looks like we are getting that permanent Lantern presence.”

“Will they want you?”

“I mean probably, for a bit. I’m not that worried, I’ve got enough rank they’re not gonna move me out of my posting here. But I know the area better than any Lantern they’ve currently got, so I’ll probably be over there for a while, helping out.”

“Will the Corps try to stop the invasion, given that there’s a peace treaty the Varn are in violation of?”

“Well, that’s what I’ve been arguing. So the discussion is about whether this is a treaty that involves the Lantern Corps, since a Lantern was a negotiating party, or whether that was just me all on my own acting for the Justice League. Believe it or not the Corps is about zero percent enthusiastic about me and my JL activities.”

“I believe it,” he said. 

“Yeah I get a little bit of an angry girlfriend vibe from them, not gonna lie.”

Bruce snorted. “Yes, I had gathered we were not great favorites with the Corps. Is that because they worry the League is an attempt to co-opt Lantern activity?”

“More like general suspicion of all humans, which is completely fair, I mean I did not pay the best attention in history class, but still, who can blame them. What I hate most about this whole shitshow is that now I have to feel sorry for those pricks the Andallians. Oh well, win some, lose some. And speaking of.” He bent down to his feet and picked up a box he had brought in with him, that Bruce hadn’t noticed until now. He set it on the console beside Bruce. “Present for you,” he said.

Bruce frowned at it. It was a small metal-bound casket, and it looked old. “What is this?” he said.

“Go on, open it.”

Bruce flipped the catch on the box. It made a small hissing sound, and the lid rose of its own accord. Inside was a dark cushion, and on that cushion rested a miniscule glass vial. The vial was filled with a clear purplish liquid. Bruce studied it. “What am I looking at,” he said.

“Oan bone growth technology,” Jordan said.

There was silence in the Cave. Bruce schooled his breathing, and the wild eager thing that leaped in his chest. “How did you get this,” he managed.

“I did some artful negotiating. I might not be able to negotiate two warring planetary systems to permanent peace, but when it comes to the one-on-one, I do all right. Buddy of mine is stationed as a medic on Oa, and one thing led to another, and—” he gestured. “Here we are. I did end up sneaking an extra bottle of Andallian hooch into the quadrant, and that might or might not have been a significant negotiating factor.”

Bruce just stared at it. He didn’t trust himself to speak. “How does this work,” he said. He knew he sounded angry, harsh. He was trying to beat down the eagerness. But Lantern seemed unconcerned. 

“Well, it requires Lantern power in order to activate, I do know that much. The idea is, this is injected into the area requiring re-growth, and the ring fuses it with the bone, and. . . it fixes it. If you want a more detailed explanation you’ll have to ask someone who’s not me. But trust me, the stuff works.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s worked on me.”

Bruce stared at the vial, and the small shimmering contents. “When,” he said.

“Back when I first joined the Corps. I had some. . . old injuries, stuff that had never healed. This took care of it. I should probably add that it was painful as all fuck. But to be fair, they didn’t anesthetize me, which in retrospect maybe they didn’t do because they were not all that read-up on human physiology, so.”

He managed to look up from the vial to Lantern’s face. His speech was his usual easy chatter, but his eyes were the grave watchful look Bruce now recognized. They were watching Bruce. “From the first time I told you about my back, on the Javelin,” Bruce said. “You were planning to do this.”

“I thought about it, yeah. I didn’t want to say anything until I knew if it was possible to get hold of it though.”

“This can’t be tech they’re accustomed to parting with.”

He shrugged. “Like I said, I know a guy who knows a guy.” 

“And you think. . . there’s enough in this vial to repair my spine?”

“There’s enough in that vial to repair every bone in your body, several times over. It’s powerful stuff, I’m telling you.”

“How long does it take?”

“Start to finish? About six hours, I’d say. Depending on.”

“And you. . .” He couldn’t think of any more questions to ask. 

“We can get started right now, if you want. Though maybe you want to get Leslie in on this, so she can do the injection, that kind of thing.”

“Yes,” Bruce said hoarsely. He met Jordan’s eyes again. “I’m not. . . really sure what to say.”

Jordan gave his smirk. “For fucking once, then. Come on, Bats, let’s get this done. I’m tired of listening to you bitch about your aches and pains, old man.”

* * *

If at any point in the last six months someone had said to him, you are going to entrust your whole life and future well-being to a plan concocted entirely by the Green Lantern, he would have assumed that traumatic brain injury was involved with his decision. Of course, that was before he had stared down the barrel of no other choice, and before he had really started to run the calculations of a life without Batman. Maybe back when he had had other options, this would have looked less appealing. But it wasn’t just that, or not entirely that. Some instinct had trusted Jordan. He had looked in Jordan’s eyes and seen it, and no, it had nothing to do with having slept with the man. He had slept with a great many people, and he trusted almost none of them. But somehow he had known Jordan was telling him the truth, that this would work. Had known from the moment he opened that little box and looked at what was inside it – almost before Jordan had told him, he had known. He had been an investigator long enough to know about trusting your gut. 

Leslie was harder to convince, of course. She wanted to see the science of it, and Jordan wasn’t going to be able to give her that. But at last she had agreed, and she had agreed that the three of them would work in the Cave, which was tightly locked down. She put Bruce in twilight sleep, which meant he experienced everything that happened as though from a great pillowy distance, and with a kind of serenity he rarely achieved. He was aware of the low murmur of Jordan’s voice, and Leslie’s, over top of him. He couldn’t remember any of the things he had been so worried about this morning. 

He was chiefly aware of the great surge of something all through his body, like a tide carrying him away. He looked down and discovered the tide was green – that would be Lantern’s ring fusing with the liquid now. He was conscious only of indescribable warmth, and for the flash of a second – shorter than that, really – he was aware of seeing right to the back of Jordan’s mind. A brilliant flash of illumination, gone as suddenly as it had happened, and like in a dream he struggled frantically to collect the pieces of what he had seen, but they slipped through his fingers. He was left with only one image: a strikingly beautiful woman, bending down to him to zip up his jacket. Her smile filled him with such radiant joy he could almost not contain it, and he remembered her touch on his shoulder, and the low murmur of her voice in his ear, but what she said he could not have told you, other than that he loved her. But there was darkness in back of her, something shapeless and vast, and he tried to get away from it but it tangled in his feet, knocking him down, knocking the wind out of him, and the darkness entirely swallowed her. 

He woke in the stillness of the Cave, to nothing but the faint drip-drip of far-off stalactites in the next cavern over. 

He lay there cataloguing, but before his eyes were open he knew, because for the first time in five years he had taken a breath without pain. Almost he didn’t want to move – the feeling of it was so indescribable, so unbelievable, that he wanted to weep with it. 

It had worked, and he wouldn’t need to see any of Leslie’s scans to know that. He opened his eyes after what felt like another eternity, but was probably only thirty seconds, and took stock of his surroundings. He was still on the med bay bed, underneath the warming lamps, spread with a blanket. He was lying on his stomach, bare-chested, a sheet draped over his legs. Somewhere he could hear movement, but far away – that would be Leslie, moving around somewhere in the Cave. Of course, she wouldn’t have left him. And then closer by, Lantern’s long form curled into a chair, hair falling over his face, sleeping. It was probably close to dawn. 

Bruce swallowed, licked his lips, and maybe the sound was louder than he had thought, because Lantern’s eyes fluttered open. “Hey,” he said hoarsely. 

Bruce’s lips moved, but no sound came. He tried moving his limbs. Pushed himself awkwardly up. Jordan held a plastic cup to his lips, and he drank.

“It worked,” he croaked. 

“Told you that one of these times I would actually know what I was talking about,” Jordan said. Bruce tried to laugh but not everything was working right yet, and anyway, he didn’t want Leslie to come bustling over here too soon. He needed these few seconds with Jordan. 

“I get. . . another question,” he said. His voice was still a hoarse crack of itself. Jordan frowned at him.

“A question?”

“The other. . . on Andallia. I only asked two questions.”

Jordan set down the cup, and his face was suddenly grave. And he could see it in Jordan’s face, his wariness at that. He was mentioning things that they weren’t supposed to talk about. Men might fall into bed with each other with enough liquor and provocation, but they didn’t talk about it afterward. He was breaking rules. “Fair is fair,” Bruce said.

“Okay,” Jordan said. 

“What were the injuries from, the ones that the Corps medics healed for you when you joined? The way you knew this tech would work. What were those injuries?”

Those dark eyes were assessing him. He kept his gaze just as bland and steady. No sudden moves. “That’s not a yes or no question,” Jordan said. 

“Okay, I’ll re-phrase. The old bone injuries that were healed, were they childhood fractures that had never been set by a doctor, and was that because taking them to a doctor would have meant admitting that Martin Jordan, ace pilot and war hero, had beat the ever-living shit out of his oldest son?” 

There was no movement anywhere in the Cave, least of all on Jordan’s body. Ten to one the man turned on his heel and walked out, never spoke to him again. But he had seen it. In his dream he had seen it. He knew what the darkness was, that had engulfed the beautiful woman and the little boy. He had seen the little boy, and for half a breath he had been the little boy. 

“That’s two questions,” Jordan said.

“It isn’t, really,” Bruce said. “But that’s a bullshit answer, and I had thought that if nothing else, you and I had agreed to stop bullshitting each other.”

Whatever Jordan’s answer would have been, he never heard it, because Leslie’s quick step was heading to his bed, and he knew they would never talk about it again. About any of it again. Somewhere in there, as Leslie was hooking him up to scanners and monitors and fussing about his O2 levels, Jordan slipped quietly away. Bruce lay back down and let her do whatever she wanted, because he wasn’t worried about what any of it showed, not when he could feel the truth in every square inch of his skin – deeper than his skin, in every molecule of his bones. Like getting air right down to the bottom of your lungs after a deep dive, was what this felt like. Hard not to be dizzy with the euphoria of it, with the weightless joy of no pain. 

Only later that day, as he was hesitantly testing the limits of his new and restored body in endless patient exercises, did it occur to him that he had never thanked Jordan. Well. Whatever the appropriate gesture was to thank someone for giving you your whole life back as a free gift, he would find it. He would find something ludicrous, something that would make the man laugh; he realized it gave him distinct pleasure, whenever a wry remark of his made Jordan laugh. A gift certificate for thirty-five dollars to Dave and Buster’s, with a scrawled _thanks for my life!_ on the outside of it. A year’s subscription to Disney Plus. A Christmas cheese basket from Pepperidge Farm. The possibilities were endless. He entertained the thought of sending him frequent meaningless gifts that he would never use, when he least expected it; he would open his mail and out would fall a diner’s card to Applebee’s: Bruce’s semi-annual thank-you gift. 

_What on earth is that?_ Hal’s companion might say.

_Oh it’s just. . . some crazy guy I know,_ he might say. And he would give that short sharp laugh, and shake his head ruefully, with that lop-sided grin. Maybe buy his date an extra plate of barbecue brisket tacos that night. And he would know, because Jordan would, that what Bruce was really saying was, _thanking you is a joke, because there is no thanks one can ever give for one’s life, and no thanks is possible for what you gave me, so here, have some spinach dip on me._

Well, he had time to work it out. He would think of just the thing, sooner or later.

* * *

_And here is where I as the author of this story run into difficulty, because wouldn’t it be nice to end it here? This is where the God of a just universe would have ended the story. I must have written and re-written this next section a dozen times, and I wonder if I was trying to come up with another way for it to end. Possibly you should stop reading here. "And they all went back to their normal lives, the end."_

_Or maybe that’s not the writing difficulty I had at all. Maybe the difficulty was, you don’t come into the next bit of the story much, and I have trouble writing any story that is not, in some way, about you. So I have elected to skip over parts that will not be as interesting to you, the parts that are just about me – all the parts where I slowly recover my full strength, where I discover that my back is not only healed but far stronger than before, even. (No superpowers, alas, though I suppose it would have been off-brand for me. Still. One does wish, as Alfred would say.) _

_As near as I can piece together, you returned to your assignment in the Epsilon Quadrant, though you might have been stationed elsewhere, I’m not really sure. I know that towards the end of that time you were briefly back on Andallia, probably as consult to the new mission there, but that’s really all I know of your movements for the intervening months. _

_My own movements I know better, but they are less relevant to the story, and less interesting. I did the things that I do: I picked back up the pieces of my investigations, and I went back into the field. Things returned to what passes for normal around my house. If memory serves, this was an especially difficult time with Damian, probably because Dick had been stepping in and taking Damian into the field for me of late, and now I was suddenly back. A more peremptory and less accommodating Batman. His relationship with his older brother is considerably less complicated than his relationship with me; it’s probably also true that Dick is considerably easier to get along with. _

_I’m betting you agree with that one. _

_So I will pick back up with the part of the story where you come in, which is to say, some months later. If you are still reading, that is. But I do, in fact, know jack shit about you, so I’m betting you are. _


	7. Chapter 7

** Chapter Six **

Bruce stood at the conference table and projected the latest findings onto the holographic screen above the table, so that the whole League could see. “We’ve narrowed the trafficking points down to eleven sites,” he said.

“Eleven,” Diana murmured.

“I agree, not much of a narrowing,” he admitted. “But these men are being exceptionally careful. There may well be more, but these are the sites with confirmed sightings of meta-human children. How many of these are currently active, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Seems like that might be some important information there,” Lantern grumbled. Feet on the table, as usual. 

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “But if we narrow our targets further, we risk allowing one of these active sites to slip through our fingers. Attacking these sites will not shut down the trafficking of young meta-humans, but if we can capture and question just one trafficker, that can be the thread we need to pull to lead us back to their home base.”

“Which you think is off-world,” Clark said. 

“I do. Not so far off-world that it removes them from easy travel to and from their current favorite hunting ground, which is Earth.”

Lantern crossed his arms and looked like he was thinking, and Bruce could guess he was calculating how much of this information he ought to relay to the Corps, and how much he could just pursue on his own hook, since this was his sector. 

“I have a question,” Diana said. She looked skeptical, which was not good news. “Well, I have two, the truth is. My first is, how many sites do you actually think are active right now? And my second is, how much of your plan of attack – because I’m assuming the next thing you are about to show us is your plan for moving on these sites – is based on assuming that most of these sites are not active? What do we do if we get there and discover that all of them are? And that all of them are filled with children, children we have no way to keep safely or rehabilitate, if that is what’s needed?”

“That’s at least four questions,” Clark said.

“Rehabilitate?” Barry said with a frown. “You mean, like if they’ve already been programmed with some kind of brainwashing, like what happened before?”

“Well I have a question about attacking eleven sites on the same damn day,” Oliver drawled, leaning back in his chair. “Because last I counted that’s gonna put us a little short-handed.”

“The plan is this,” Bruce said, flicking to the next screen. “Wonder Woman, I can address your questions one by one, but I think the most important one is your second question, about the assumptions underlying this plan. If we can move through point by point, then I think by the time we’ve finished you will see that—”

“So this is a hold our questions till the end sort of deal? Excuse me, Professor, this isn’t an Econ lecture at Gotham State, this is a battle plan, and yeah, I’m gonna have some questions on the front end, so deal.” Lantern’s skeptical frown was now a scowl, and even Clark was looking uneasy.

“Eleven sites is a lot, I admit,” Bruce said. “But with significant back-up, it won’t be beyond our capabilities. We have a chance here, and it’s one we need to seize.”

“You’ve been to some of these sites,” Diana said, with a narrow look at him. 

“Yes. I have done some basic recon, and I have a good idea what we’re up against.”

“Did you see children?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“Any you could identify?”

“I wasn’t able to get close enough. And if I had attempted a rescue then, it would have made this operation impossible. The best chance I could give them was to leave them until we could mount an attack on all the sites at once.”

“The likelihood is, those children are now off-world,” she said softly.

“Possibly. But it’s been less than twenty-four hours since my recon, so possibly not. And I’m proposing we move on this within the next twelve to sixteen hours, so if we could focus for a minute on the best strategy for—”

The doors of the conference room whooshed open, and two Green Lanterns that Bruce had never seen before entered the room. Everyone stilled, and the Lantern on the left – a pale, fish-like creature, with a facial expression impossible to read – stepped forward. 

“My apologies for the interruption,” he said, in a voice that made it clear he was not at all sorry. “I am Green Lantern Zellamun. My colleague and I are here to take Green Lantern Hal Jordan into custody and remove him immediately to Oa. Our orders admit no delay.”

Everyone at the table got to their feet, except for Jordan, he noted. Jordan remained where he was, and did not look surprised. “What in God’s name are you talking about?” Clark was saying, and there were angry voices now, Oliver’s louder than anyone’s, questions being shouted. 

“Custody for what?” Bruce said.

“For theft,” Zellamun said, and Jordan still did not move, but was just watching them both, that assessing look on his face. 

“There’s obviously been a mistake,” Clark said. “Hal Jordan hasn’t stolen anything. He’s a trusted member of the Justice League, and no one is removing him from anywhere. If the Corps wants to have a problem with the League—”

“No one’s going to have a problem with anyone,” Jordan said, and he was getting up now, still watching Zellamun and the other Lantern. “It’s fine. I’ll go with you guys back to Oa. Batman, looks like you’re going to have to move ahead with these plans without me in the mix.”

“Green Lantern Zellamun,” Bruce said, keeping his voice as restrained as possible. “May I request five minutes’ private conversation with Green Lantern Hal Jordan before he leaves?”

Zellamun (probably) frowned. “My apologies, but our orders do not allow for any delay. Should Green Lantern Hal Jordan evade custody—”

“I’m not fucking evading anything,” Jordan said angrily. “I told you I was complying, you wanna back the hell off?”

“The League would be grateful for the courtesy of a few minutes,” Bruce said, cutting across Jordan, who was not helping himself. But then he didn’t have the look of a man who was interested in helping himself. Zellamun looked from Bruce to Jordan, to Clark, and then around the table. 

“Very well,” he said grudgingly. “Five minutes. We will wait.”

“With me,” Bruce said, sweeping into the private room off the conference room. Jordan followed him, and he heard Clark’s quick step behind them too, before the door slid shut. Bruce ripped off his cowl the moment they were alone.

“You lied to me,” he said, rounding on Jordan. 

“He lied to you about what?” Clark said. “Will someone tell me what the hell is going on here? Does anyone feel like telling me why the Green Lantern Corps feels they can just walk onto the Watchtower like they own the place and give orders to us, and somehow now they want to _arrest_ you, Hal? For _theft_? What are they even talking about? Good God, theft of what?”

“Of medical technology,” Bruce said smoothly, not taking his eyes off Jordan, who was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, not looking the least bit repentant. 

“Your back,” Clark murmured, because no one ever accused the man of being slow to put the pieces together. Bruce had never shared with him how bad it had been, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t known. Had never told him he had been cured, either, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know that too. 

“You’re a liar,” Bruce said levelly, right at Hal. “You lied to me. If I had had any idea that you had stolen that tech—”

“You would’ve what?” Jordan said. “Go on Bruce, tell me what you would’ve done. Turned it down? Go on, tell me that one, and then call me a liar again. I told you exactly what you needed to hear, and I sure as fuck didn’t notice you asking me too many questions.”

The perfect justice of that landed in his middle. Clark was watching them both. “You took that choice away from me,” Bruce said.

“And here I thought,” Jordan said softly, “that you and I had agreed to stop bullshitting each other.”

He had no answer to that. Clark was watching not Jordan but him. An investigative reporter was a terrible choice for a best friend. “Hal,” Clark said. “Exactly how much trouble are you in, for stealing this tech?”

“On a scale of traffic ticket to execution, you mean? Well the good news is, Oa doesn’t have the death penalty. Bad news is, really spotty wi-fi in Oan prisons, so I never am gonna know how season five of The Magicians shakes out. What the fuck kind of show kills off its main character like that? Maybe the guards’ll give me a tablet or something and I can write my super angsty emo-boy fanfic.”

“Shut up,” Bruce snarled. “Stop wasting time. Hal, whatever you do, you will not plead guilty, do you understand me? I don’t know what Oan justice looks like, but you will keep your goddamned mouth shut and not give them any reason to make this worse.”

“Bruce,” he said. “Come on. I did it. I’m guilty as fuck, and I’m not gonna pretend I’m not. And I knew what was gonna happen when I did it. Eyes wide open, all right? I’m just surprised it took them this long.”

An Oan prison. Probably with a fair number of residents put there by Hal himself. His arrival would be an occasion of celebration. They’d be sharpening the knives for Hal before his ship even touched ground on Oa. And how many decades before the Guardians let him out, if they ever did? Hal was just watching him, the way he did. 

“So let’s get this show on the road,” Hal said, and he pressed his hand to the doorpad, stepping through it to where the League and the Green Lanterns were waiting. 

“Hal, c’mon, tell these fuckers they’re making a mistake,” Oliver shouted – evidently he had been arguing with the Lanterns, and from the looks of it he had not been the only one. Every face around the table was angry, waiting for Hal to tell them it wasn’t true, eager to defend their friend. Hal was looking only at the Lanterns. 

“Your ring,” Zellamun said, and for the first time Bruce saw hesitation in Hal – the barest flinch. And then he had pulled off his ring and handed it over, and the uniform washed off him, and he was wearing his flight suit, and he wasn’t a Lantern. He still towered over the other two Lanterns. “Extend your hands,” Zellamun said. 

“I said I was going with you,” Jordan murmured. “I gave you my ring. Come the fuck on, Zel.”

A quick glance between Zellamun and the other Lantern, the one who hadn’t spoken. “Very well,” Zellamun said. “We will not bind you, for now. Green Lantern Hal Jordan, you are under arrest for the theft of Oan technology, in violation of your oath as a Lantern and of the laws of Oa. As such you are surrendered to the custody of the Guardians, who will decide your fate upon arrival on Oa. Should they decide that—”

“How?” Bruce interrupted, and everyone stopped and looked at him. “How will the Guardians decide his fate?”

“I. . .” Zellamun did not look like he was used to being interrupted. “The Guardians will examine the facts of the case, and make the wisest possible decision based on—”

“I have information relevant to the case,” Bruce continued. “So I would like the opportunity to speak to the Guardians. I am in fact the single most relevant piece of information in this case.”

“Excuse me, I’m the one being arrested, I think this does get to actually be about me,” Hal said. “Zel don’t listen to him, he’s crazy, just get me on the ship, all right?”

“If there is information that the Guardians should have, you are welcome to present it to them upon your arrival on Oa,” Zellamun said.

“No,” Hal said. “Nuh uh, no way, I swear to God if you try to—”

“It is time for our departure, former Green Lantern Hal Jordan,” Zellamun said, and he grabbed Hal’s arm, marching him toward the doorway. The other Lantern fell into place beside him, flanking Hal. Had they expected resistance? 

“Batman goddammit you stay away, do you hear me,” Hal was shouting back over his shoulder as they marched down the hallway and toward the waiting ship.


	8. Chapter 8

** Chapter Seven **

Bruce paced the length of the little room, and paced back the other direction. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling, and the view was spectacular, even if the quarters were not overly luxurious. Too much to hope, he supposed, that anyone on Oa would be glad of their presence here. It should have been just him – a far less obtrusive presence if it were just one of them, but Clark was not going to take no for an answer. 

“It should be the League’s presence,” he had said firmly. “I’m going to Oa with you.” And he was right so far as it went – the Corps was at least aware of who Superman was, so that helped. Even out here, everyone knew about Earth’s Kryptonian, and Clark’s presence turned them into an official delegation. Diana would stay and follow up on their initial success at those eleven sites by co-ordinating the League’s attack on the major meta-human trafficking hubs, though she had protested. 

“I’m the one who’s most skeptical of this plan,” she had said. 

“Exactly why you ought to be the one leading it,” Bruce said. “If I’ve made mistakes in the intel because of something I wanted to see, you’ll be the first to spot that.”

“You just don’t want me going to Oa with you.”

“I don’t want anyone going to Oa with me. But as soon as you figure out a way to stop Clark from doing whatever he wants to do, please let me know.”

She gave a grim laugh. “I will be sure to. And you, my friend. Be sure to bring Hal back to us, yes? I don’t know what terrible mistake they have made, but I trust that you will fix it.”

He had said nothing to that. Had said nothing to anyone in the League who had asked, pressed him for information. Was it because he didn’t want to admit to them that Hal Jordan was in fact a thief? Or was it that he didn’t want to admit that he was the one who had benefited from Hal’s crime? 

He paced the room again, watching the Oan cityscape come to life in the pinkish glow of dawn, stretched hundreds of feet below. What a strange place this planet was. The Guardians had selected it as their home base because it was uninhabited, remote. And then of course the Corps’ base was here, which meant a functioning military and police base with thousands of occupants – a small thriving city. Any military base required at least triple the number of military personnel in support and staff, just to keep it operational, and that wasn’t even counting the family members who lived here, or the bustling city that had built up around them. And then of course, there were the refugees, the people who had had nowhere else to go. There was something he knew about that – was it Hal who had said something about it, years ago? Where had he heard it? That at first the Guardians had resisted allowing Oa to be used for galactic refugee re-settlement, but the Corps had pushed back, had made them change their policy on that one. So it could be done. The Guardians could change their mind about something; they had done it at least once before.

That was the tack he would take, when he stood in front of the Guardians. He would talk about how Oa had changed and become something greater and more compassionate than it had been, because of the Corps. He could talk about how that same compassion, that relentless drive that refused to stop as long as there was one person you could help, was what had motivated Hal Jordan to do what he did. He had been driven by the same unselfishness that had opened the gates of Oa all those years ago. Yes. That was a good way to begin, but he would need to make sure of his Oan history first. There had to be a library or an archive, somewhere he could gather more information before he based his argument entirely on –

The doors of their quarters whooshed open, and Clark walked through, brow furrowed. 

“No luck,” Bruce said. 

“None. They still won’t allow us to see him, or communicate with him in any way.”

“Did they give any reason? This makes no sense. From everything I’ve been able to access about the Corps’ disciplinary regulations—”

“He’s not being held by the Corps.”

That stopped him short. “You mean he’s being held directly by the Guardians?” Bruce said. 

“Yeah, apparently. And apparently that’s something of a new situation, and no one at Corps headquarters quite knows what’s going on. I think he was in Corps custody when he arrived, and then he got transferred. No one is even sure exactly where he is now.”

Bruce felt the chill in his bones at that. “Or if there’s even going to be a trial,” he said. 

“Correct. I mean, who the hell knows what’s going on. I did speak to Tomar-Re, though.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, for like five seconds. He promised me that the minute they find anything out, they’ll let us know. If you want my gut read, Tomar-Re was not happy about any of this.”

“About our presence here? Or about Hal’s imprisonment?”

“Both. I think there’s some kind of dispute here – the Corps thinks that this is a question of military discipline, and they should be allowed to run the show—”

“A court-martial,” Bruce murmured.

“Yeah, something like. But apparently the Guardians don’t agree? I don’t know, Oan politics is not the easiest thing to figure out.”

“It’s not a question of discipline to the Guardians,” Bruce said, narrowing his eyes as he thought. “A Green Lantern takes their oath to the Guardians, and he has violated his oath, from their point of view. If his ring is the only thing forfeit, he’ll be lucky.”

“They wouldn’t dare execute him,” Clark said. “I mean – come on, surely not. This is Oa, not the set of Les Miz.”

“Are you not understanding that he has committed treason? This is not a simple theft.” 

Bruce turned and watched the city below plunge into full daylight, as the twin Oan suns crested the hill surrounding the city. He ought to have gone with Clark on his early morning visit to headquarters. There might have been some nuance Clark had missed, some observation that had escaped him. They had been here for ten days – ten days of obfuscation, of bureaucratic delay, of endless reasons for more delay. Would it have been different if they had been able to come earlier—ought he to have called off their attacks on those trafficking sites, come directly here? But no, it would have made no difference. All their attempts to see Hal had been blocked. He had thought that since the League had such good relations with the Corps, that things might go more smoothly, but already it was clear that the Corps and the Guardians were two entirely separate entities. Much as the Guardians might wish the Corps to be nothing more than an extension of their will, that was not always the way things worked out. He had a hard knot of suspicion deep in his gut that the Guardians would be happy to use Hal Jordan’s treasonous activity as a lash with which to beat the Corps – a handy excuse to bring them to heel a bit, and remind them exactly who they had sworn their oaths to, and why. 

But that was just conjecture on his part. While Clark had been at Corps headquarters early this morning, he had been out most of the night walking the city, as he was every night. You could hear things in shadows that people wouldn’t say in the light – rumors, gossip, uneasiness. A ragged cloak had covered his features and turned him into just another interplanetary refugee, buying pies of questionable meat from street vendors who were only too happy to chat while they dished up food. Universal translators had made conversation possible with all sorts of people, and of course sex workers in every planetary iteration were always the best and most trustworthy source of information. 

“We need to speak to Tomar-Re away from Corps headquarters,” Bruce said. “Or Kilowogg. Hal’s closest friends in the Corps should be able to tell us something more. I need you to go back and see if you can—”

There was a ping at their door, and they froze. It opened to Tomar-Re, and Bruce realized he was the same species as the Lantern who had come to arrest Hal – Zellamun, that had been his name. But Tomar-Re had an air of command about him, and he looked older, if fish could be said to age. The door slid shut behind him. 

“Kal-El of Krypton and Earth,” Tomar-Re said. “And. . .”

“Batman of Earth,” Bruce said. 

Tomar-Re was still looking at him. Fish did not actually blink, as it turned out. “Batman is your title, as Green Lantern is mine,” he said equably. “But it is not your name. I am Green Lantern Tomar-Re of Xudar.”

“I am Bruce Wayne of Earth,” he said.

Tomar-Re gave him a nod. “I have news,” he said. “There is a possibility that you might be able to see Green Lantern Hal Jordan before he is moved to another holding station.”

“Whose holding station?” Bruce said sharply. “On Oa, or elsewhere?” 

“I do not know. He is being held by the Guardians, and their communication with the Corps on this matter is. . .” he hesitated. “It is not frequent.” 

“But we can see him?” Clark said.

“I believe so. There is a brief window of time before he is transferred. Since Lanterns are securing his transport, it should be possible for you to see him. Are you prepared to come with me?”

Clark glanced at Bruce. “Now?”

“We would need to move quickly.”

“Let’s go,” Bruce said. He tossed aside the ratty cloak he was still wrapped in and was out the door, not pausing to look if Clark or Tomar-Re were behind him.

* * *

Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this. He had imagined something bleak and cavernous, possibly hewn out of rock – a dark underground place like one of the Corps’ prisons he had seen once. Or something sterile and dingy, like a prison on Earth. But Tomar-Re had led them through gleaming passageways within the main government complex itself, or what he supposed was the government complex, if Oa could be said to have a government. Probably there would be Lanterns appointed to administer the city, instead of any sort of independent government – the planet was, after all, a giant military base. 

After a long while of walking the spotless and gently illumined hallways behind Tomar-Re, with only an occasional glance from passing Lanterns, they were led into a small room that took them slowly down. An elevator of sorts, but traveling at speeds beyond what Earth elevators were capable of. Tomar-Re was silent. When they emerged, it was to more clean and well-appointed hallways. He tried to estimate how far under the planet’s surface they were. How many layers of rock would Clark have to rip back in order to rescue Hal from this godforsaken place? From the skate of Clark’s eyes his direction he knew his thoughts were similar. 

After another mile of walking, and endless branching which Bruce carefully mapped in his head, they arrived at a corridor like all the others, perforated by occasional blank slate doors. Tomar-Re pressed his hand against the doorpad, and it slid open. The room it revealed was pleasantly lit, though completely bare. Hal stood quickly, from where he had been sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, his head bent. 

“Tom what the hell,” he said, his voice low and angry. “What the fucking hell, what’s the one thing I told you _not_ to—I said keep them the fuck _away_, what the hell do you think you’re doing—”

“You have ten Earth minutes,” Tomar-Re said, and he was gone, the door shut behind him. 

“Goddammit!” Hal was shouting at the two of them now. “What is the _ONE_ thing I told you to do, it was to _stay the fuck away_, you’re not helping me here, you’re just making everything worse, you fucking idiots!” 

Bruce said nothing, but studied his face. It was not Hal Jordan’s face as he had ever seen it. The man was clean, well-shaven, and dressed in dark serviceable clothing that appeared to fit him. He had every outward appearance of a well-cared for prisoner, and the face of a man who had been continuously tortured for ten days. The bottom dropped out of Bruce’s stomach, as he studied Hal’s hollow eyes, and the hollowness behind the hollowness, and the gray circles that pushed at his cheekbones. 

“Hal, come on,” Clark was saying gently. “We can let the Guardians know that there was a reason for what you did, we can be character witnesses to—”

“I do not fucking need a character witness, you massive fucking idiot,” Hal snarled. “There’s not going to be a trial, so just hop back in your little ship and get the fuck out of here already. Tomar!” He banged on the door of the little room, shouting louder. “Tomar, get them out of here, come on, get them away from here!”

“Why isn’t there going to be a trial,” Bruce said quietly. Hal spun around, and Bruce caught the way his eyes weren’t tracking – they slid just a little too far to the left, and had to slide right again to find him. 

“Because there’s not,” Hal said. “There’s nothing to decide. I’m guilty, and I’m not going through the fucking sham of a trial. Plus even if there was one, it wouldn’t be like what you’re used to on Earth, so get the fuck out of here with your character witness bullshit. What’s the plan, Bruce, you’re gonna get up there in front of the Guardians and say what, exactly?”

“The truth,” Bruce said. “You were right, what you said on the Watchtower. When you brought me that tech I did know, or at least suspect, that it had not been acquired legally. You were right that I didn’t ask questions. By that standard, my guilt is as great as yours. If the Guardians are prepared to punish you, they have to be prepared to punish me as well.”

Hal fell back against the wall now, and he gave a long low laugh. “Ah, Bruce,” he said, and his voice sounded different now. “You are such a fucking piece of work, man. You really are. Like, there really is some part of you that really thinks they won’t hesitate to say okay, fine by us asshole, and throw you away to rot in some cell for the rest of your goddamn life.”

“Like they’re going to do you?”

“They’re not,” Hal said. “That’s not what’s gonna happen.”

“Then what is going to happen?” Clark said. “Hal, talk to us, what makes you think they’re not going to just lock you up and throw away the key?”

“Because I’m pressing option b,” he said. “For which I most certainly do not need the fucking Keystone Kops here. I mean look, you guys are great, and the Justice League does good work. But let’s just be frank for a red hot fucking minute here, all right, because you guys are out of your depth. You have no business on Oa, you know fuck-all about how things work here, you don’t know the first fucking thing about anything here, and if you think you’re prepared to deal with the Corps, much less the Guardians, you are. . . you are just so fucked in the head I don’t even know where to start with you.”

“What is option b,” Bruce said, his voice still quiet. 

“Maybe so,” Clark said, “maybe you’re right that we don’t know anything about Oa or the way the Guardians work, or the Corps. But like hell were we going to leave you here without even giving it a shot. Bruce is right, if there’s any possibility we can speak to someone and explain the circumstances of what you did—”

“Stealing,” Hal said. “What I did was called stealing, and I’m a thief.”

“Your reasons for what you did were understandable, were noble even, and in terms of an attempt to keep the League together, to keep its founding member able to function and help protect the galaxy—the Guardians ought to honor your altruism, if not the methods of—”

“You hear that?” Hal said, and he was talking only to Bruce. “Apparently you protect the galaxy now. How’s that work, do you use the extra special Batmobile for that? Or do you just strap on your jetpacks and zoom right out of the atmosphere? Like some shiny black dildo of justice.” He gave the same long low laugh, the unsettling one. Clark was talking over him, trying to get him to pay attention, to help them out, to give them some idea who to talk to, because that was what Clark did. There was always an angle left untried, always one more stone to unturn, for Clark. 

Bruce just watched Hal, which meant that when Hal’s eyes slid shut he was there to catch him.

“What the—” Clark said, but Bruce shook his head, lowered himself and Hal gently to the floor.

“Sleep deprivation,” Bruce said quietly. Hal had gone slack in his arms. He could feel the pulse of Clark’s outrage in the silence of the room. 

“Why,” Clark said, his voice a low thrum, and he wondered if the Guardians had any clue what a bad idea it was to make a Kryptonian angry. They had to be aware that Kryptonians – or this Kryptonian, at any rate – could not be held by Lantern force.

“I don’t know,” Bruce said, and he didn’t. What would the Guardians gain by gratuitously torturing Hal? Was it just what he had thought earlier – a way to strike at the growing independence of the Corps, of reminding them whose hand was on the leash? Hal’s head was heavy on his shoulder, his whole body collapsed. 

“I say I get all three of us out of here right now,” Clark said, and Bruce shook his head again.

“You could get yourself out,” he said, “but not us as well. And even if you could get us out too, by the time we made it to the surface we’d be facing the combined firepower of the universe’s most sophisticated military base, and I don’t like those odds.”

Clark crouched beside them, and he knew he was studying Hal. Bruce had the strangest impulse to shield Hal’s face, cover it with his hand. “What the hell was he talking about, with option b?” Clark mused softly. 

Bruce said nothing, but just held himself there, a support for Hal. And he knew Clark was watching him, too – watching Hal’s head on his shoulder, watching Bruce hold him. The quick dart of the investigative reporter’s eyes. That was the funny thing about Clark, was how people were always assuming that the most important fact about him was that he was an alien, and ignoring the most dangerous fact about him, which was that he was a journalist.

After a few minutes he heard the door slide back. Tomar-Re was standing there, and Bruce met his eyes. “One more minute,” he said, as quietly as he could. Whatever passed on Tomar-Re’s face, he couldn’t read it. 

“I’ll do what I can,” he said, and went back out. Bruce and Clark sat there in silence, willing the minutes to be enough for Hal’s exhausted body. Bruce kept his mind blank, trying to let the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Quite a few puzzles to work out, was the thing.

“I could get us out, but the fact is I’d probably have to kill Tomar-Re to do it,” Clark said.

“He would not forgive you that,” Bruce murmured. It seemed like only a few seconds before Tomar-Re came back. Bruce knew he would have given them all the time he safely could. Bruce shifted underneath Hal, trying to bring him to wakefulness gently, but the man startled and shook. He staggered to his feet, pushing off of Bruce. 

“What are you—I told you—what the hell are you still doing here, both of you,” he said hoarsely. “Tom, get them out of here, I told you—I told you not to—” 

“The prisoner will come with me,” Tomar-Re said, grasping Hal’s upper arm and hauling him through the door. Bruce watched them go, watched Hal stumble as he struggled to keep up. He had never actually seen Hal stumble before, never once seen him lose his footing. Strange what it did to him; strange that nothing had filled him with murderous rage like Hal’s small involuntary stumble.

* * *

“Here is where you answer some questions for me,” Clark said when they were back in their quarters. 

“Oh is it now,” Bruce said, pouring himself some water from one of the spotless carafes. 

“We could start with why you never talked to me or anyone else in the League about just how bad your medical situation was, but you somehow decided to share that information with the Green Lantern?”

“To be begin with, my medical situation, as you call it, is no one’s business but my own, and whom I choose to share it with is my call. And I shared it with Lantern because it was necessary to our mission that he understand my impairment. And also because there was frankly no hiding it from him, when I was injured in our crash landing.”

“But apparently there was hiding it from me.”

“I suppose so, Clark, and you’re right, we should spend more of our precious time talking about your various imagined slights. For God’s sake, could you pull your head out of your ass and focus here?”

“Fine,” Clark said, crossing his arms. “I’m happy to focus. Have you managed to come up with a plan in the last fifteen minutes?”

“I’m working on it,” he growled. 

“So while you work on it I’m going to go with the assumption that more information is better than less, and right now I’d like a little more information so I can better understand what the hell could have made Hal do something like this. Because right now. . . right now I can’t imagine what he must have been thinking, to do this.”

Bruce stood at the window and nursed his water. He needed sleep, and a shower, and to clear his head. But somewhere not too far from here, Hal Jordan was being tortured. And he couldn’t lie down to sleep knowing what was being done to him, knowing how sleep was not a luxury Hal had. Clark had come to stand with him at the window, to watch the bustle of the city below them. 

“Bruce,” he said quietly. “What the hell happened on Andallia?”

“Mistakes,” Bruce said. “Mistakes, is what happened on Andallia.” 

Too many mistakes to count, right from the beginning. The miscalculation that had stranded the Javelin, to begin with. Their inability to keep the Andallians and the Varn from escalating warfare. Their misread of just about every situation they had encountered. And he saw the other mistakes, too, the ones he didn’t want to think about. His fist landing across Lantern’s jaw. That ill-fated bottle of brandy. Lantern’s arms wrapped around him, the taste of his mouth, the delicious press of his body. Which of those many mistakes had landed Hal here, and for which mistakes was he responsible? _All of them,_ whispered the voice inside him. 

Clark was watching him, but he knew himself well enough to know that none of that was on his face. Well, he was done with mistakes. There was no more room for error. “We need to try Kilowogg again,” Bruce said. “Tomar-Re has taken enough risk by letting us see him, and my sense is he’s not inclined to risk more. Kilowogg may be harder to get to, and have less authority than Tomar-Re, but my gut says that he’ll be better able to—”

The door whooshed open again, and Tomar-Re stepped quickly inside. His gaze was impassive as ever, and just as impossible to read. “Greetings,” he said, as though they had not been with him an hour ago. 

“Tomar-Re,” Clark said. “Thank you for what you did this morning. We appreciate your willingness to—”

“I have news.” He glanced from one to the other of them. “There is to be an arbitration.”

“An arbitration,” Bruce said with a frown. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means that Green Lantern Hal Jordan has reached an agreement with the Guardians. This agreement means that he will retain the use of his ring, he will be restored immediately to his full rank in the Corps, and he will be released from custody at the end of the arbitration.”

Bruce glanced at Clark. “That’s excellent news,” he said. “What happened?”

Tomar-Re appeared to hesitate – but again, that might have been just what fish people looked like. “Green Lantern Hal Jordan has invoked an ancient provision in the founding documents of the Corps,” he said. “It is not a provision that has ever been exercised within my lifetime, nor the lifetime of anyone serving in the Lantern Corps. There was some initial confusion about whether it could indeed still be said to apply, the rule is so ancient.”

“What does the rule say?”

“I am not entirely clear on that. I do not know the details of Green Lantern Hal Jordan’s agreement with the Guardians. But I do know that he has asked for and been granted arbitration.”

Clark was frowning now too. “I don’t understand,” he said. “If it’s arbitration, then we will get a chance to present our case, yes? But you said that the case had already been decided, so what does—”

“Arbitration is simply the nearest available translation into Earth languages,” Tomar-Re said. “And as I said, I have never witnessed this before. Nor has anyone else, aside from the Guardians – if indeed even they have. Representatives from the Corps have been invited to be present for the ceremony, and I have been allowed to extend an invitation to one of you as well.”

“And after that he’s free to go?” Bruce said.

Again the barest hesitation. “Yes, if he—yes, he will be free to go, absolutely. That is what I have been given to understand.”

He met Clark’s eyes again. “I see,” he said. Tomar-Re’s answer was hardly a confidence-inspiring response. “So this is what Hal meant by option b. When is the arbitration?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Tomar-Re said. “I will come to your quarters before the ceremony, and you will accompany me.” He gave a quick bow, and exited as abruptly as he had entered. 

“What the hell,” Clark murmured. 

“I’m suspicious too,” Bruce said. “But it does appear to be good news. I ought to be the one to go tomorrow. There’s a possibility they might still want to hear testimony, and I need to be prepared to offer it. You should stay with the Javelin and stand ready to get us out of here as soon as this arbitration, or whatever it is, finishes tomorrow.”

“Agreed. But. . . none of this makes any sense. They torture him for ten days and then let him go? For what? What has he agreed to give them?”

“That is the question to be asked. But I don’t see a way for us to find out the answer before tomorrow. The likelihood is, if he’s reached an agreement with the Guardians then he will come to no further harm, so until we know more I suggest we get some rest and prepare to leave here with Hal at the earliest possible opportunity.”

“And you’re going to be prepared to speak on his behalf tomorrow?”

“Obviously.”

“Well if you wanted to practice your speech, I could—”

“I don’t. I’m going to go to the Javelin and see if I could use her communications array to send a transmission to the Watchtower. It’s a long shot but we need to try to let them know what’s going on. Receiving any message from Diana is too much to hope for, but we can make an effort to update her, though we’ll likely be in range before our message is.”

“Okay, but I still don’t understand what—”

Bruce turned and let the door slide shut behind him as he headed to the docking facilities. The square and plazas were crowded, and he was just one more strange creature going about his business, though he did merit a few glances from passers-by; not many humans in this sector of the galaxy, and most of them had probably never seen one. He wasn’t wearing his cowl off-world like this; it tended to put people off, and especially on Oa he had needed to inspire trust. But it did mean that his human features were visible to the curious. The Oan air was cool and bracing against his skin, and it cleared his head, helped him think. 

He could still feel the weight of Hal’s head resting against him, when he had collapsed. His body must have been pushed to its last possible limit and beyond, and he had expended the last molecule of his energy in looking normal for them. God damn every person on this planet to hell for what they had done to Hal. But he was being released. He was being released, was the thing to focus on. Hal could sleep all he wanted then. They would get him to the Javelin and let him rest. He wished like hell Clark had never come. He had never thanked Jordan, not once. Hadn’t had the chance, hadn’t had the words. If Clark weren’t here, if they were alone on the Javelin tomorrow, he could seize Jordan’s hand, he could say. . . could say. . . who knew what he would say, but he would find the words. Maybe Hal’s head would rest against him, like it had in the holding cell. 

_So tell me what feels good to you. Or do you want me to stop?_

_Don’t stop touching me._

_Baby_, Hal had called him, with such gentleness. He could hear the exact tone he had used. 

_Don’t stop touching me._

_Baby._

_Don’t stop touching me._

_Baby_.

The guards at the docking bay let him through, and he pushed all those memories aside, locked the door on them where they belonged. Pathetic, that his brain kept re-playing the meaningless moments of a drunken rendezvous. It was just that touching Hal today had made it come rushing back. It was nothing but a sense memory, triggered by. . . triggered by. . . 

By the feel of Hal’s body sagging against his. The heavy weight of Hal’s head. If Clark hadn’t been there he would have cradled him so tenderly, would have bent his head to Hal’s. Would have whispered _I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, this is all because of me, because of me._

He slammed the Javelin’s outer door shut and ripped off the cloak that wrapped him. None of this was helping Hal. Not that he had done a damn thing to help Hal since he got here. But with any luck, by this time tomorrow the three of them would be heading home, and Hal could brief the League on what had happened, and this would be one more adventure to file away in the reports. It would mean the League knowing more medical information about him than he had ever wanted them to, but that was unavoidable at this point, and at this distance it didn’t really matter, not now that the whole thing would be behind them. 

_Baby_, Hal had murmured in his ear. _Gorgeous. Fuck I’m gonna cum_.

Well fine then. If that was what his body wanted, he could give his body that. Hal would probably not be averse to some more fucking around. Getting it out of both their systems would probably be a good thing. He was certainly a better lay now than when he had been on all those meds, so it would be all the more enjoyable for both of them. A nice celebration, when they got back to the Watchtower. Over and done. Chapter closed. 

He flipped the switch on the communications array. “Batman to the Watchtower,” he began. “Situation under control here, Green Lantern is being released from custody. ETA to Watchtower, 30 hours.”

_If we had some lube, Jesus Christ, I would want this to fuck me_. That’s what Hal had said, his hand sliding down his cock, caressing him. Well if that’s what Jordan wanted, that’s what he would get. He would fuck him into next week, he would fuck him so long and slow and good. He would fuck him until he cried out with it, until his mouth spilled more of those delicious obscenities, until his whole body shook with pleasure. 

“Headed home,” Bruce said, and he flipped the comm recording off, entered the co-ordinates, and sent it off into space.


	9. Chapter 9

** Chapter Eight **

Tomar-Re arrived the next morning to accompany him to the arbitration. They said nothing as they walked the long halls, but this time they headed in a different direction – not down into the bowels of the administrative complex like yesterday, but up just a few floors. It was mainly Lanterns walking these upper halls, and they were generally too polite to stare at him like the people in the city had, but there were plenty of veiled glances his direction. 

At the wide double doors where guards were posted, Tomar paused and turned to him. “I don’t know what the arbitration is going to look like,” he said. “I have searched the Lantern archives, and I have found no instance of a human invoking or undergoing arbitration. I am not sure what the results will be.”

Bruce frowned and opened his mouth to respond, but just then the guards opened the doors to admit the two of them, and they were ushered into a large hall whose windows looked out onto the Oan horizon. The room was crowded with Lanterns in uniforms, all of them standing and watching whatever was going on up on the dais. More of them turned around to look at Bruce, and he noticed there was a bit of a circle that had formed, clearing the space around him and Tomar. There were Guardians up on the dais – or at least, Bruce was assuming that was what they were. Much smaller than he had imagined them. Smallish blue creatures who glowed with a strange radiance, some internal incandescense, and he realized that the Lantern glow was similar somehow to theirs, though beside this shimmering blue glow with its depth and richness, the glow of the Lanterns looked flat and tawdry. The Guardians looked infinitely old, infinitely patient. 

On a small pedestal at the front of the dais rested a ring. Hal’s ring, it had to be. 

“What’s happening,” Bruce murmured to Tomar, who shook his head. 

One of the smallest of the Guardians floated forward. “Green Lantern Hal Jordan,” she said in a clear voice that carried to the back of the hall, “has requested an arbitration. Such is his right, and we have honored it.”

There was a low murmur among the Lanterns standing nearby, and Bruce could see the towering figure of Kilowogg, who appeared to be frowning, saying something to another couple of Lanterns, who were also scowling and shaking their heads. And now Bruce could feel it all around him, the tension in this room. Whatever was happening here today, it was nothing most of the Lanterns liked. Did they not want to truth to come out in an arbitration?

“When will I be able to speak?” Bruce said to Tomar, who just looked at him. 

“Green Lantern Hal Jordan,” the Guardian resumed, in a louder voice that carried over the murmurs, “has consented to the risks of arbitration. In all things the ways of the Ancient Ones have been followed.” 

More murmuring at that. Some angry voices. Kilowogg’s arms were crossed. What in hell was happening? The room crackled with anger now. What Ancient Ones was she talking about? What possible risks of arbitration were there?

“Green Lantern Hal Jordan may now enter,” she pronounced, folding her hands into her robes. A pair of side doors opened, and Hal walked in, flanked by guards. They had their hands on his arms, and his hands were bound behind him. He stood on the dais now, and he glanced at the gathered crowd. He frowned.

“This was not the agreement,” he said angrily. “I never agreed to witnesses, you know that!”

“The arbitration will now begin,” she declared, gliding back to her place on the dais. The guards seized his arms again, and at that exact moment Hal caught sight of Bruce standing there, and Bruce could see it in his body, the shock of it. “_No!_” Hal shouted, and for the first time there was something of desperation in his voice. “Tomar, get him out of here! Kilowogg—get him away, I was promised that there wouldn’t—get him out of here!”

“What’s going on here?” Bruce shouted, stepping forward. There were glowing green bands that closed suddenly around his arms, dragging him back into place. And now the guards were removing Hal’s shirt, they were stripping him. What in the name of—

“This is not what I agreed to!” Hal was yelling as the guards moved him, and now they were raising his arms, they were dragging him toward the side of the dais. “There was never any talk about witnesses, I want everyone out of here, you can’t do this, this wasn’t what we—”

“Green Lantern Hal Jordan, you have invoked the ancient rite of arbitration, by which the Lantern force itself will decide your guilt or innocence. Should you survive the arbitration, you will be restored to your rank and freed from custody. Should you not survive, your name will be erased from our records, and your ring shattered.”

Bruce fought against the implacable green bands that held him. “Survive the arbitration?” he shouted. “Listen to me, this man is innocent, it’s me you want, it’s me that—” A green band clamped around his mouth, and Tomar’s lips were at his ear. Bruce gave an involuntary flinch at the cold dampness of Tomar’s flesh. 

“Silence,” Tomar whispered. “You think this will help him now? There’s nothing any of us can do except watch. You will give him the dignity of silence.”

“Like hell I will,” Bruce tried to say, but the green band around his mouth muffled his words, and the bands around his arms and legs would hardly let him move. For the fraction of a second, Hal’s eyes met his—an anguished glance, and over the rising uproar in the room he could hear Hal’s voice shouting something indistinctly. And then he couldn’t see because of the surge and press around him, and when he was able to see the dais again Hal was facing the wide windows, and there was a glowing blue archway of some sort, and Hal had been tied to it. It was as though everything had slowed down, in that peculiar way of moving that time had when adrenaline had flooded your system. 

And then the Guardian who had spoken raised her finger, and the first crackle of blue fire stunned the hall into silence. These were hardened warriors, and so there was no gasp – more like a collective exhale, and a stillness. Bruce stopped struggling against his restraints, limbs gone slack in horror. Jesus no. The blue fire that had crackled from the senior Guardian’s fingertips had snaked like a lash across the dais, and sliced across Hal’s bare back. His back ran blood. And then she lifted her finger again, and another lash descended, and this time he could hear Hal’s groan at it, see the impact of it. Hal’s whole body jerked at the force of it. 

“_STOP!_” Bruce shouted into his restraints, but it was no use, no one could hear him, it was pointless.

_Should you survive the arbitration_, she had said, and then he knew, then he knew the truth, which was that Hal had never been intended to survive. The sickening crackle of blue fire blazed across the room again, and once more, and then again—each time wrenching a groan from Hal, each time coating his back in blood. And at first Bruce only saw the blood, and didn’t realize what was actually happening. Every time the electricity, or whatever it was, made contact with his skin, it scattered all over his body like a million tiny lightning strikes, and Hal would jerk and convulse. They were electrocuting him with every lash, and Bruce could scream himself hoarse if he liked, but no one could hear him, and there was nothing he could do to help.

So he held himself motionless in his restraints and watched. What Hal could endure to undergo, he could endure to watch, and he did not flinch or remove his eyes from any of it. The sheets of blood running down Hal’s back were the cover for the real torture, of course, the one happening inside his body every time that evil blue lightning connected with him—ripping at every neuron in his body, tearing him apart from the inside until he had no air to scream. The only sounds were his choked groans, and the worst part was the pause between each blow – the pause in which his ragged breath was audible as he tried to suck in air before the next lash landed. Bruce’s world narrowed to that sound, and only that sound. He stilled his whole body and willed its strength to Hal’s broken, exhausted body, but he would not shut his eyes or his ears. 

_Now would be the time for that telepathy thing you and Supes have got going on_, Hal had said to him once. This would actually be the time, but Clark could not help him now, because he could not cry out for Clark to hear. 

He had no idea how long the agony of it went on. Two minutes? Twenty? Forty? The dais ran blood, and the blue fire was a steady lash now. It was all he heard, all he could see. The sick light of it soaked the room. If he had thought the sounds Hal was making were horrible, it was nothing to the horror of the silence. Hal’s body was unresponsive now, even when the lightning hit his body. 

And then the green bands restraining him were gone, and Bruce staggered forward, fell to his knees. The restraints had cut off his circulation, and he could barely move, his limbs were on fire. Things were happening all around him – the Guardians were floating away up on the dais, the Lanterns were shifting and surging, there were voices now, but he couldn’t register any of it, not really. He stumbled up and toward the dais. 

“No,” he said hoarsely. Hal’s body was lying motionless on the dais. If he was breathing, Bruce couldn’t see it. “No, come on, no no no, Hal come on,” he said, staggering toward that bloody wreckage, but his voice was broken and shaking. There was so much blood, and how, how, how did the story always end this way? He was always holding a body, always the one soaked in the blood of a beloved, and it was always, always his fault, he had done this, it was him, him alone. With shaking fingers he tried to pull Hal’s body toward him, tried to cradle him, and he threw his head back and screamed “_Kal-El!_” in a voice that he hoped was loud enough, but his voice was hoarse, and he must have been screaming behind that green gag without realizing it. There were other people surrounding Hal now, other Lanterns, but whatever they were trying to say was lost in a roar of wind that at first he thought was in his own head. But then he felt Clark’s hand on his shoulder and knew what the wind had been, and he hauled Hal’s body closer so Clark could get them both out of here. 

A hand reached for Hal—Kilowogg’s? Tomar’s? he couldn’t tell—but he knocked it away and snarled, “Get away from him,” which was all he was able to say before the wind had seized him too.

* * *

“Fly us out of here, _now_,” he snapped to Clark the second they were back on the Javelin. He collapsed with Hal’s body on the floor of the ship, but he had recovered enough to be careful of his head, to tilt back his airway. He pulled off his own shirt to wipe at the blood, because he would need a clear field.

“Fly, dammit!” he said, and Clark hurtled into action while Bruce got started on Hal. “Breathe goddammit,” he growled, knotting his hands together to pump Hal’s chest, tilting his head back to breathe air into him. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Breathe, breathe. He ripped the AED from its niche in the wall, applied it to Hal’s still chest. One shock. Two shocks. Three shocks. He ripped off the pads, knotted his hands again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. 

“You listen to me, you son of a bitch,” he said through gritted teeth. He held Hal’s jaw in his grip. “You will breathe right goddamn now, do you hear me? You will breathe!” He worked until his arms ached, until he was sure there was no part of Hal that could hear him, no part of Hal that had survived, and then there was a wet cough and rasping sound and Hal had rolled on his side and was dribbling vomit. 

“Keep him on his side!” Clark called from the cockpit.

“You don’t say,” Bruce muttered. He cleaned Hal’s mouth, checked for signs of aspiration. Then he reached for the oxygen masks beside the AED and planted one over Hal’s face. He needed something to put underneath him – his back was stripped to raw meat, and he was lying on the cold metal. Maybe there were deeper gashes that Clark could seal. 

“Do you want to fly, let me look after Hal?”

“Just get us out of here!”

“Way ahead of you,” Clark said, and Bruce glanced out the windows to see that yes, in fact they were already outside of Oan atmosphere and speeding their way to the Watchtower and thank God, thank every god he knew of. He watched the rise and fall of Hal’s chest, watched the fogging of his mask. His eyes had slipped closed again, but unconscious was good, unconscious was probably sparing him the agony of being awake for this part. 

“We should be able to get a message through,” Bruce said, and he was surprised at the cracked sound of his own voice. “Get Leslie to the Watchtower stat, and send a message for a surgical team. He’ll need emergency transport to Earth, but we’ll need to get him stable on the Watchtower first. If Leslie can—”

“Bruce,” Clark said.

“_Fuck_,” Bruce spat, because Hal had stopped breathing again. 

Time did many strange things that day, and throughout the long hours of their journey back to the Watchtower. He lost track of how many times Hal coded, and how many times he brought him back. He and Clark tried to take turns, but there was the danger that Clark might over-compress, or that Clark might make a momentary error and tear a hole in Hal’s fragile lungs with the force of his breath. So it was mainly Bruce compressing and breathing, in between the AED, and Clark who did the listening for sinus rhythm. In between they were able to lean against the wall of the ship and rest. 

It was only Hal’s indomitable will keeping him alive, that much was clear. But every time they had to bring him back, his odds got that much worse. Every time he thought, Hal’s body couldn’t do this one more time. And every time they were able to bring him back, until the next time.

“You have his ring,” Clark said to him at some point, and Bruce looked down at his hand, astonished to see that in fact he did. He was clutching it. That must have been what Kilowogg had thrust at him in the confusion of the hall, and he hadn’t even realized it. He lifted Hal’s right hand and slipped the ring back on him. He studied the metal next to Hal’s brown hand. 

“What in God’s name happened back there?” Clark finally said, when they were able to rest, but Bruce shook his head. He lacked the strength to describe it. And what really would he say? Hal had made a bet that from his point of view had no downside. If he survived the ordeal, then he would be a free man. And if he didn’t survive, well, then at least he wouldn’t die in an Oan prison. 

“How many hours to the Watchtower?” he said. 

“Four and a half. A better pilot than me could shave some time off that. Hal could probably do it in half. You want the helm?”

Bruce shook his head again. He stayed where he was, on the floor next to Hal, willing the next breath with him, and the breath after that. He could feel Clark’s eyes on him. Well, let Clark draw whatever conclusions he wanted. He didn’t have time to worry about that right now. 

“His BP’s dropping,” Clark said. 

“Shock. We’ve got to get him warm.” Bruce grabbed the blankets from the bunks in the rear, pulled open storage lockers to find more. Why hadn’t he stowed more blankets in here? He had thought about it, after they had been stranded and the Javelin had been so cold. But it was one of those things that had slipped to the bottom of his list over the last month; there had been so much else to do, as he had picked up the threads of his life in the wake of his recovery. A recovery bought with Hal’s broken body, and now here was one more mistake – Hal might very well die of shock before they could get him to a medical facility, for lack of enough blankets. One more mistake, one more act of carelessness, and Hal would pay the price with his life. 

Clark helped him bundle the blankets around Hal’s body. There was blood everywhere, and the coarse blankets were the worst possible thing for his wounds. Maybe it was the pain of the scratchy blankets on his open wounds that roused him, but for a second or so he lifted his head. “What. . .” he began, his eyes bleary.

“Lie back down,” Bruce said gently, easing him down. “It’s all right. You did it. We’ve got you on the Javelin, we’re headed back to Earth. Everything’s fine.”

Hal looked at him like he was trying to figure something out. “My. . . head hurts,” he croaked. 

“Leslie will take care of that. You just rest.”

Hal let his head down again, and it hit the metal floor with a thunk. Bruce eased himself underneath Hal’s head, shifted his head onto his lap. “You rest now,” he said softly, and Hal’s eyes slid shut again. He slipped his hand into Hal’s and held him anchored there, willing the heat of his body into Hal’s. Hal had given him warmth when he had needed it so much, on Andallia. And now he was powerless to help Hal when he needed it most. 

Clark came and crouched beside him, as the Javelin hit autopilot on its final trajectory home. “How did Hal know about Oan bone growth technology?” he asked. 

“They had used it on him, years ago. For some old injuries.”

“Did you ask him to try to get it?”

“You know I did not,” Bruce said. 

“I still can’t make the math of it add up, is all. He wanted to help you, I get that. It was your only hope, you know that and I know that, and Hal knew it too. But he didn’t just take a calculated risk to get that tech. He gambled his whole life.”

“No,” Bruce said. “It was never a gamble.”

Clark frowned. “What do you mean, you think that he—”

“I think that he knew the endgame from the beginning.”

Clark said nothing to that. Bruce hadn’t even realized it until he was standing in that hall watching them strap Hal to that frame, and then every piece had snicked into place. Hal hadn’t been surprised when they had come to arrest him; of course he had known it was just a matter of time. He would have known what the only possible end was, before he had even taken that little purple vial off Oa. And Hal had done his research – he had known about the rule of arbitration, because when would he have had the time to research obscure provisions of the Lantern Code while he was being tortured in an Oan prison? Never, is when. This had been Hal’s plan all along. The only spanner in the works was the two of them following him to Oa – that he hadn’t planned on. Or Bruce witnessing it. He had fought to the end to make sure Bruce didn’t have to see what the price was going to be. But it had been a price Hal was planning to pay from the first. 

And he couldn’t even keep him warm. He lifted Hal’s hand in his, held it to his face, closed his eyes. He pressed his forehead into that hand, and he didn’t care if Clark saw, didn’t care what Clark thought. “His pressure’s back up,” Clark whispered. “Holding steady.”


	10. Chapter 10

Hal pushed away from his desk, pushed the chair away. His chest was pounding. He stared at the laptop, at the words on the screen, the blinking cursor. 

“That’s a lie,” he said hoarsely. He backed away from the laptop like it was a snake. He went to the bathroom, stripped off his shirt. His back – he ran his hands over his back, twisted to see his back in the mirror. It was perfect, unmarked. There were no scars on it, no sign that any of that had happened. “It didn’t happen,” he said to his reflection. “It’s a lie.”

_Why would Bruce lie?_ said a small voice inside him. 

“Because he’s fucking delusional, that’s why,” he said out loud. “I was injured off of Thanagar. It was a firefight. Kilowogg was with me. We—there was—I. . .”

It was real. He could see it, like it was happening right now. 

_So why don’t you get in touch with Kilowogg and ask him?_ said the voice again. 

No, he didn’t need to do that. That was ridiculous. Bruce was certifiable. He had concocted this whole elaborate lie, this was proof the man was a fucking head case, and he was doing it to fuck with him, he was doing it just because he could, he had always hated him, always tried to undermine him, had never taken the Corps seriously, this was just one more piece of Bruce hating him and everything he stood for. He gripped the sink in the bathroom until it felt like his fingers would crush it. Bowed his head. Shook with it. 

“It’s a fucking lie,” he said to his reflection, through gritted teeth. The thing to do was not to read any more of that delusional bullshit. He was going to walk out of here, walk out of his quarters, go right back to Earth, crawl into his bed in his apartment, and never think about any of this again. It was all a fucking, fucking, fucking lie. 

Through the open door of the bathroom he could see his laptop sitting on the desk, and the open document. He would walk over there and shut it right now. He would pitch the whole thing out an airlock. He could do it. He could do it right fucking now, and none of this would ever have happened. He could live in a world where none of this was happening. 

He closed his eyes and took a deep centering breath. Met the gaze of his own reflection again. 

_If Bruce were delusional_, said that fucking voice inside him again, _if he were just chronically off his meds, it wouldn’t be upsetting to read this, would it? It would just be sad. It would make you feel sad for him, not angry. Why are you angry?_

“Because he’s wrong,” he whispered back.

_Is he?_

He could see the tiny blink of that cursor where he had left off reading. With lead feet he walked back over to his desk, sat back down. He needed a drink. He needed to be drinking a bottle of scotch while he read this, only he didn’t exactly store hooch in his quarters on the Watchtower, because that would probably be the textbook definition of Having A Problem and Hal had skated close enough to that line in his life already and he didn’t need to skate any closer. 

That was one thing: Bruce had been right about where he stored the whiskey on the Javelin. He knew for a fact he was the only one who knew about that. So. . . that was one thing Bruce had gotten right. 

_And if he got that right, what else is he right about?_

“Nothing,” he said aloud through numb lips. “He’s not right about anything else. It’s all a fucking lie.”

A lie he couldn’t stop reading. He raised a shaking finger and scrolled down on the keyboard.

* * *

** Chapter Nine **

Leslie shut the door of her small office by the Watchtower medbay. “Here is where you tell me exactly what happened to him,” she said. 

Bruce shook his head. “I wish I could. I’ve never seen the Lantern Force used that way before, if that even was the Lantern Force. It was visible – like a whip made of lightning, is the only way I know to describe it. But I know too little about the Guardians and the power they wield to understand what it was they did to him.”

“Oh, I’ll show you what they did to him,” she said, and she flipped the switch on a lightboard beside her desk. He had supplied her with tech that wasn’t available in any hospital, and she was able to move the MRI projections with her finger, manipulate them in 3D. “What they did to him was hyperextend every neuron in his body, that’s what they did to him. And I’m damned if I know how to fix it.”

“Does the hyperextension—”

“It means I can’t stop the seizing,” she said. “You told me his heart kept stopping in the Javelin. Cardiac arrest was the symptom, not the source of the problem. He was seizing, that’s what was going on, and his body couldn’t withstand it. I’ve got him so sedated right now that the next stop is respiratory failure, and I still can’t stop the seizing. If you tell me this was Lantern Force that did that to his body, then I’m going to go snatch that ring off his finger and smash it with a hammer right now, because I don’t want that near him or any other human being again, ever.”

He stood by the door that led into medbay, and looked through the window at Hal lying there. He was still as death, but the monitors showed a different story. The EEG read-out looked like a wave graph, with its high spikes. Underneath Hal’s calm exterior, there was a neural lightning storm. Leslie came and stood beside him. 

“If I wake him,” she said, “he’ll die. He’s got significant organ damage and some internal bleeding, and I can’t get to any of it until I can slow this seizing.”

“Use the ring,” Bruce said.

“Excuse me? I’m not touching that ring for any reason, much less—”

“Use the ring,” he said again. “Tell it what to do. The ring is connected to him, and it can speak to his brain in ways we can’t begin to understand. I don’t know what it can do, but I do know that Hal’s ring is your ally, not your enemy.”

Leslie just looked at him. “I’m not going to manipulate a technology that you’ve just admitted we don’t remotely understand. I’m not going to watch him die, but I’m not going to place him at greater risk, either.”

“I’m not going to stand by and watch—”

“Standing by and watching is exactly what you’re going to do, because this is my medbay and you take my orders, and if for one second you disobey me in here I will throw you out on your pointy little bat ear, are we clear?”

He wasn’t wearing bat ears, he was wearing a shirt and jeans, but it did not seem like the time to contradict her. They watched Hal through the window. “What’s his best case scenario?” he said after a while. “Granted that we know the worst, what’s the best?”

“Best case scenario, I’m able to patch him up, he has minimal internal damage, and we can control his seizures with medication.”

“But long-term, what are—”

“That is long-term. I’m board-certified in neurology, and I’m telling you that the human brain does not recover from this kind of seizure pattern. The hope is that the activity subsides, and he lives a more or less normal life. I’ve seen that happen, in one or two cases. It’s the best possible outcome.”

“Epilepsy,” he said.

“A seizure disorder. Epilepsy is an umbrella term that is less helpful. There are hundreds of different seizure disorders, and we know more about them than we did back in the days when we piled everything in the epilepsy basket and called it a day. And by the way, you don’t know the worst case scenario.”

“Oh?”

“The worst case scenario isn’t that he dies. It’s that I don’t get control of this seizing soon enough, and it eats his brain, but his body survives.”

He watched Hal, and the erratic waves of the EEG. “That’s quite the bedside manner you’ve got yourself there,” he murmured.

“Well that isn’t why you hired me.” She crossed her arms and watched through the window with him. “I can tell you every possible outcome here. But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is the why of any of this. I just don’t understand it. Why would he let them do this to him?”

Bruce said nothing, but he was thinking of Tomar-Re’s words outside the hall, about how no human had ever undergone arbitration before. It all made much more sense to him now, what had happened back on Oa. It would have been long, long ages ago that the ceremony of arbitration had been invented, in a more primitive time. It would never have been intended for use on humans, but Hal would have known that. “It was the only way to keep his ring,” he murmured, as much to himself as to Leslie. “His ring was forfeit from the minute he stole the tech, and he knew it. An acquittal at arbitration was the only way he was getting it back.”

“He risked his idiotic life.”

He didn’t reply, because there was no way to make her understand. Being a Lantern was Hal’s life. It was who he was, at the deepest level, down to the mitochondrial level. He was a Lantern to the core, and it was sheer will keeping him breathing now. He pushed open the door into the medbay, and pulled up a chair beside Hal’s bed, watching the rise and fall of his breath. He was intubated to stabilize his breathing, and the blip of monitors and the hiss of the respirator were the only sounds in the room. Bruce studied Hal’s hand lying on the sheet. 

“All right,” he said. “You won. You did it. You got the tech that saved my spine, and you kept your ring, and you’re still a Lantern. Can’t imagine the Guardians are going to be too happy about that, but for now let’s just agree to fuck them.”

The only answer was the respirator’s steady wheeze. “I know why you did it,” he continued. “It’s because ever since I first met you, you’ve been trying to take from me the title of stubbornest son of a bitch on the face of the planet. Well congratulations, I think you have finally succeeded. You would think that the time I strapped myself to an actual nuclear missile might have done it, but no, you just couldn’t let it rest. You had to try to do me one better.”

He watched Hal’s face, which was still and unmoving. Strange to think he had never seen it that way. Strange to think how much life there had been in the man’s body, how he had never actually seen him completely at rest. Even sleeping, he had been. . . alive. 

“The thing is this, Jordan,” he went on. “In order to win you need to be alive. So you’re going to need to do the next part, which is living. Do you really want me to win forever? Is that really what you want? Because unless you get up out of this bed, I’m going to be the stubbornest son of a bitch, and I know you well enough to know you’re not going to let that stand. So come on, Hal. Get up out of this bed and fight me for it. I know you want to.”

He stayed there until he lost track of time. Barry came in for a while and sat with him, and Clark. He caught sight of Dinah’s head peering through the window. He fell asleep in the chair and woke up stiff, and the respirator was still wheezing at him. He got up and went into the hall, rubbing at his neck. Clark was there, and he handed him some coffee. “Angel of mercy,” he said, drinking it gratefully. 

“How are you?” Clark said.

“I’m fine, I’m not the one breathing through a tube.”

“Leslie says she’s going to start surgery.”

“He’s stable enough?”

“I think it’s more a case of not being able to wait.” 

He grunted and sat down on the bench to finish his coffee. Clark sat beside him. “Listen,” Clark said. “Hal is a smart man, and he made his own choices. I know you, and I know the way your mind works, and I think it’s important that you not blame yourself for this situation.”

“Oh I wouldn’t worry about that,” Bruce said. “I usually get over it quick enough.”

He got up and pitched his coffee cup at one of the waste bins, and headed to his quarters. He could wait for news of the surgery there; he was doing nobody any good by hanging around medbay, and his presence was probably irritating Leslie. And maybe even Hal too, who knew.


	11. Chapter 11

** Chapter Ten **

Bruce picked his way along the rocky outcropping, trying to follow the path. It was dark, and the tide was high, so he was careful of his footing – some of the rocks were slippery. The person sitting on the boulder could certainly hear his approach, but didn’t turn around. 

In the distance, the runway lights of Miramar Air Force Base flickered in the heat of jet wash. It was an excellent spot for watching take-off and approach, no question. And he shouldn’t have been surprised that this was where he had found him. “Mind if I join you?” he said, hauling himself up onto the rock beside Hal, who made no response. There was a six-pack next to him. His eyes were on the distant runway, where an F-16 was queued up. In silence they watched the ground crew scramble, and the F-16 roared down the runway and into the air with a blaze of fire in the darkness. Hal took a swig off his beer. 

“You’re a hard man to locate,” Bruce said.

“I turned my comm off.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Well I had this crazy idea that if I didn’t, some asshole might try to track me down like I was some little old lady’s housecat that had made a break for it.”

“Well if you see that asshole, let me know, I’ll try to throw him off.” 

Hal snorted a laugh and pulled out another beer, handing it to Bruce. They drank in silence, watching the approach of. . . Bruce squinted into the distance, tilting his head.

“F-35,” Hal said. “Angle of the tail-light.”

Bruce nodded. “I’m guessing today was not great news,” he said. 

“Nope.”

“Do you mind if I ask what the—”

“Yep.”

Bruce subsided into silence, and studied his beer. The F-35 hit the runway and banked hard east toward the hangar. “How come Wayne Industries doesn’t build fighter planes?” Hal asked after a bit. “I’ve always wondered that.”

“Because we’re not in the business of building guns, even flying ones. Especially flying ones.”

“Guns can be used to make peace, not just break it.”

“This is probably not an argument either of us wants to get into.”

“Yeah,” Hal said thoughtfully. “No actually, I do. A flying gun, huh? So I want to know what it is you think about pilots. Because if a fighter jet is just a flying gun, what the hell are pilots? The hand on the trigger?”

Bruce sighed. This was not at all where he had intended this conversation to go. “The military that owns that plane is the hand on the trigger,” he said. “And Wayne Industries does not build fighter jets because once that plane has left the construction hangar, you’re not in control of who the U.S government sells that plane to, or what is done with it. Look at the F-16. The world’s most popular fighter jet, and we’ve sold it to twenty-five of our closest allies. I’m not building the world’s next F-16. I don’t need to be any richer.”

“So if the military is the hand on the trigger, I guess pilots are. . . what? They’re just the mechanism of the gun, I guess. The mindless bit of machinery that makes the bullet go. Is that it?”

“I didn’t mean to imply that the—”

“Fuck off.”

Hal swigged his beer, and Bruce set his aside. Hal’s anger pulsed in the silence, but he was looking at the runway, not at Bruce. “I have nothing but the utmost respect for what it is you do,” Bruce said gravely. 

“Well it’s not what I do anymore, so I guess it doesn’t matter what the shit you think, Spooky.”

Bruce picked up his beer and drank as much of it as he could bear. Its flat metallic taste was revolting, but the kick of it was soothing. “Look,” Hal said, and his voice was quieter. “I came out here because this is where I come when I need to be alone, and right now, I really, really am not great company, all right?”

Bruce studied his beer. “I promise to keep my mouth shut,” he said. “If you would let me stay.” 

Hal made no response, so he figured that was as good as he was going to get. He sat on the rock beside Hal and sank into his center, letting his mind drift. But his mind kept snagging on the driftwood in the current – on Hal. He thought about Hal coming here, these last few months. Sitting on this rock and watching the planes take off at Miramar; watching what he could not have, and would not have again. Hal’s face was impassive. 

There was no guarantee that Hal would find even his silent presence an acceptable one. 

He certainly had not found it acceptable in the hospital, during the long weeks of his recovery. Bruce had tried to be there as much as possible, but evidently that had been the wrong thing to do.

“Look,” Hal had sighed, one afternoon after his second surgery but before his third one. “Not to be rude, but you are bumming me right the fuck out.”

Bruce had frowned. “I—” he began.

“You’re literally brooding _at_ me,” Hal had said. “There are like actual waves of brood coming off you. I realize you think that this is somehow all your fault because you are genetically programmed to believe you are the center of the entire universe and everything that happens to anyone is because of you, but do you think I could have like, ten minutes of a break from that?”

“That—I did not intend for—I don’t—” he said stiffly, and stopped. 

“Bruce. Please. Go the fuck home. I’m fine, or as fine as I’m gonna be. And my man, I could really use a break from—” he waved his hand in Bruce’s general direction. “From whatever the fuck is going on with you.”

“All right,” Bruce had said. “If you prefer. Though I would appreciate knowing how you’re doing.”

“I’ll text you bi-hourly updates, I promise. And if I really need to feel like shit, I promise I will call you.”

So he had left, and had given Hal his space. He had called Barry a few days later, to ask if Barry would please keep him updated, and Barry had been a reliable if at times overly optimistic source of information. He sent Bruce regular updates on Hal’s progress, and stopped by the Cave when he could. Bruce had the uncomfortable feeling that Barry felt sorry for him, probably because Hal had told him he had banished Bruce, and Barry felt bad about that. Being the object of pity was not something Bruce was used to, and it made his skin crawl to think of Hal and Barry talking ruefully about him, and Hal rolling his eyes probably. Maybe the two of them laughing together. But he had taken Barry’s updates gratefully, and tried not to press for more, and when Hal was released from the hospital he sent a congratulatory text, but that was it. In the intervening months he had seen Hal maybe twice. 

Bruce finished off his beer, and set the empty can on a flat part of the rock. “Sorry that it’s cans,” Hal said. “I know the cans taste like shit.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s just that I don’t drink out of glass anymore. Last time I bought beer in a glass bottle, I dropped the bottle and the glass broke and went everywhere. Made a huge fucking mess. My kitchen smelled like beer for a week.”

Bruce discovered Hal was looking at him. “I’m sorry I shut you out like that,” Hal said. “Before, I mean. I just couldn’t deal.”

“I understand why I might not be your favorite person right now,” Bruce said quietly. 

“Jesus Christ,” Hal sighed. “For once. For once in your fucking life. Will you please accept that not everything is because of you? I swear to God, you’re like a narcissism meme generator. Insert any facts you want and out comes an expression of how it’s all really about you. Well my life is not actually about you, all right? In fact my life has pretty much no relation to you. Try to wrap your head around that concept.”

“Can I ask for another beer, or is that making the beer all about me?”

Hal gave a grim laugh and handed him a beer. “You’re such an asshole,” he said.

“Yeah well, you’re no picnic, sweetheart.” 

Hal’s laugh at that was a genuine one, and he pulled off another beer for himself and popped the tab. In the distance there was another F-16 ready for takeoff, the ground crew running final check. “I miss driving,” Hal said. “Isn’t that weird? I never thought about driving much before. But I miss it more than flying. Just being able to go wherever you want without calling an Uber. Things you never think about.”

“I’m guessing Leslie did not clear you.”

Hal squinted into the distance, swigging off his beer some more. And then he held up his right hand, palm down. Just held it there. Bruce watched the tremor in it, the small constant shake.

“You would be guessing correctly,” Hal said, and put his hand down. 

He swallowed down more of his beer. Bruce thought about asking if the alcohol was a problem with the anti-convulsants, but now was probably not the time. “I mean, it’s not like it’s bad,” Hal continued, and he was looking at the can of beer like he had never read its label before. “It’s not like most people would even notice. The seizing is more of a problem. I mean, at most I just kind of blink out, a few seconds here, a few seconds there. Of course all that makes me exactly the person you don’t want behind the controls of a flying gun, so.”

“So no improvement from last EEG.”

“Nope. This is just me. I should probably move to a city with actual functional public transportation, before I piss away my entire inheritance in Uber costs. But most of those cities are on the east coast, and the east coast sucks balls, so.” Hal shut his eyes, tipped his head back. “I lied,” he said hoarsely. “It’s not driving I miss. I miss space.”

Bruce watched the runway in silence. The tremors were bad enough. They would ground him from fighter planes, but not from his work as a Lantern. Frequent loss of consciousness, even if it was only momentary – that was something else altogether. That would mean breaking the connection with the ring. And in space, of course, that would be deadly. So the ring that sat on Hal’s trembling hand was to all intents and purposes useless to him. Hal had gone from wielding the greatest power in the known universe, from flying around the rings of Saturn and dipping into the sun’s corona whenever he felt like it, whizzing past stars and comets and distant planets, to needing to take a bus to the grocery store. 

He himself had once faced that kind of loss. Not as dramatic as Hal’s, because he lacked Hal’s power, but intense nonetheless. He had faced the loss of everything that defined him, of everything that made him Batman. But here he sat on the rock beside Hal now, with his perfect spine and his restored life. 

Once, after his back had been fixed, he had contemplated how to thank Hal. What do you say, he had wondered, when someone handed you back your whole life as a free gift? Only it had not ended up being free. Hal had bought Bruce’s life with his own. And what the words were to thank him for that, he had no idea. 

Hal was still sitting there, eyes closed. There was enough reflected light from the field to shade the angles of his face. He was so beautiful it made Bruce’s chest contract to look at him. What he would give to touch him. What he would give to be able to say impossible words to him. “I know what you’re thinking,” Hal said. 

“I’m betting you don’t.”

“You’re thinking that if west coast cities hadn’t gutted their tax base by allowing limitless suburban expansion away from the city center, they might have had the funds necessary to build a public transportation infrastructure.”

“It’s like I’m an open book.”

Hal laughed again, and stretched out on the rock, arms behind his head. “And you’re also thinking it’s pathetic that I come out here and watch the runway.”

“I promise you I’m not.”

“Okay, maybe I was projecting there.”

“Now who’s the narcissist?”

“Be nice to me or I will literally kick you off my rock.”

And then because he was out of all other options—because God, or fate, or whoever it was in charge of the universe had decided to reach down and intervene and breathe just a split second of rationality into him, or possibly just because he was exhausted with the weight of not saying what needed to be said, all the months of not saying the words, he decided to be honest. Maybe the right words with which to thank someone, after all, were just words of thanks. “Thank you for my life,” he said simply. “I’m sorry it came at the cost of your own. If I could reverse our situations, I would do it.”

Hal sat all the way up and looked at him. Looked right to the back of him, he thought for a fleeting second—like that moment when the Lantern force had surged through his own body and he had seen right to the back of Hal. For the first time it occurred to him that that might have gone both ways, that Hal might have seen into him like he had seen into Hal. “Bruce,” he said, in another voice. “I would never in a million years want that.”

“I know,” he said. “But I thought—” He turned away and looked back across the inlet to the lights of the base.

“You thought what?”

“I thought that was why you didn’t want me at the hospital, because you hated the sight of me.”

Hal gave a long exhale. “No Bruce, hating you was never my problem. I didn’t want you at the hospital because there really is just so much existential brooding and self-loathing a person can take. And also because every time you looked at me like I was the dog that pushed you away from the bus and then got run over, I felt just that much shittier.”

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said. 

“’S okay. But none of it was your fault. You know how I know that?”

“Because your life is not actually about me?”

“Look at you, learning shit already.” Hal knocked his shoulder against Bruce’s with a grin. Bruce tucked his smile into his beer. 

“So,” he said. “In keeping with our no-bullshit agreement, mind if I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Hal said. “Fire away.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Why what?”

“Why you did it. Knowing what the risks would be, I mean.”

Hal looked thoughtful. “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe you’re overestimating how much I calculate things like risk. You needed something, and I knew I could get it for you, so why wouldn’t I? Most of the time I just decide to do shit, and some of it works out and some of it doesn’t, is the best I can tell you.”

“Good God,” Bruce sighed, and Hal laughed.

“But the narcissist in you was like ninety-percent hoping I would say, it was your magic cock, right? That I threw my whole life away because I was so in love with you?”

“Believe it or not, I’m not delusional,” Bruce said. “I understand the difference between knowing a thing is so, and wishing it so.”

Across the inlet the F-35 was coming in for a landing, the running lights fanned out like the wings of a bird of prey, and the roar of the engines moaned upward and then down as the pilot pulled back on the throttle. You could almost feel the heat of it from here; on flight deck it would be overwhelming. And in the blink of that moment Bruce heard the words he had just said, the words that had spilled out of his mouth between one sip of beer and the next. He froze, his eyes fixed on the runway. If Clark were here, he would hear the pound of Bruce’s heart. Maybe he could hear it all the way from Metropolis. Maybe he was sitting up in bed right now. _What’s wrong honey?_ Lois might be murmuring. _Nothing_, Clark would say with a slight frown. _Thought I might have just heard Bruce douse himself in a can of rhetorical gasoline and light the match. I’m sure it’s nothing._

“Bruce,” Hal said, very quietly. “Here is where you look at me.”

And somehow he did. “I apologize,” he said, though his mouth was dry as sand. “It’s. . . my problem, not yours.”

“Put your beer down.”

He did. Hal’s hand was on his jaw, tilting his face so he could see him, like he was looking for something there. And then Hal’s lips were brushing his, and air came rushing back into Bruce’s lungs. He kissed Hal as gently as Hal was kissing him. And oh God the sweetness of it, the taste of his mouth, the warm beery richness of Hal’s tongue against his. Hal pulled back slowly, still studying Bruce’s eyes. 

“Is there someplace we could go,” Bruce said, surprised at the hoarseness of his voice, “that’s not a rock in the Pacific Ocean?”

“Yeah baby,” Hal breathed against his face, nuzzling at him. And there, there was the word he had been waiting to hear all these months, in exactly that tone of voice – waiting to hear again what he had heard on Andallia, waiting in some part of him that he hadn’t even known was sitting there, eager, listening. That part of him rose up now and seized the back of Hal’s neck and ate his mouth hungrily, and Hal was kissing him back just as hard and fierce. 

And then Hal was standing up and pulling Bruce with them, and collecting their beer cans – such a small homely thing to do, this bit of normalcy in the midst of everything else – and he was picking his way back across the rocks, but extending a hand for Bruce to hold too. And he knew it was not because Hal was worried about his footing, but because Hal wanted to hold his hand as much as Bruce wanted to hold his. 

“You gotta drive, though,” Hal said, and Bruce set their empties down on the hood of his car and pulled Hal to him for more kissing, and this was even better because they were standing upright, and he could pull Hal’s whole long glorious body against his, and now Hal’s hands were wandering.

“Hey I get one,” Hal said, and he was gratified to hear that Hal was a little out of breath.

“Mm,” Bruce said, nuzzling at his jaw. 

“Why’d you sleep with me, before? On Andallia?”

Bruce paused. “I don’t know,” he said, surprised. “I guess because I wanted to. I wasn’t really thinking about it.”

“Are you thinking about it now?”

Bruce slid both hands around Hal’s jaw, held his face to his own. “Yes,” he whispered, and kissed him again. 

It was a short drive back to Hal’s apartment, but it felt like hours. He drove carefully, but he did also have one hand entwined with Hal’s. They weren’t quite able to let go of each other, not entirely. He parked on the street and they walked up the path to Hal’s duplex, still holding hands. It was a lovely little post-war bungalow, with wide windows and a shaded porch. Hal fumbled with his keys. 

“Any day now,” Bruce murmured, leaning against the doorframe, and Hal laughed, and then dropped his keys, which could have been a tremor or could have been because neither of them had any blood above their waist. They made it through the door, and their hands were back on each other—had never stopped touching, really—while Hal flipped on lights. He was walking them back to the kitchen. 

“What are you doing?” Bruce said.

“Got to—turn off the alarm,” Hal panted, pressing buttons on the pad with one hand while keeping the other wrapped around Bruce. He was still kissing Bruce, so it wasn’t going as efficiently as it might. Bruce started laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“You,” Bruce said. “You just never seemed like the type to invest in home security.”

“Well I do keep the universe’s most powerful source of energy stowed behind a concrete block in my fireplace, so I thought maybe the extra thirty-five a month was worth it?”

Bruce laughed again and pulled him closer. Backed him up against the kitchen counter, ran his hands up that gorgeous body. Pressed himself against Hal, sealed his mouth to Hal’s. He felt the moment when Hal stiffened slightly in his arms, and he pulled back.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered, and Hal shook his head. 

“Nothing, I—” He extricated himself. “I just—forgot that—shit.”

“Forgot what?”

Hal had turned away and was bracing himself on the counter. He closed his eyes, licked his lips. “I just forgot that, ah, I don’t—the thing is, the meds I have to take—fuck,” he spat.

“Hal. I don’t give a shit what we do. Let’s lie on the sofa and watch a movie, I don’t care.”

Hal’s head was still bowed. He remembered how he himself had been scoured with shame, on Andallia, when it had been him and his meds. He reached for Hal, pried his hand gently off the counter, entwined it back with his hand. “Hal,” he said. “Come on. I think this is the part where you look at me now.”

Hal’s eyes skated up, then back down. “Didn’t mean to lure you here under false pretenses,” he said tightly. “I honestly just forgot. I mean, sometimes things are fine, and sometimes they’re not, and I just—I’d rather this not be one of the not-fine times.”

Bruce nodded. He held Hal’s hand tighter. “I didn’t come here to get laid, I came here to be with you,” he said. “But if you want me to go, I will.”

“I don’t want that. Sorry. Didn’t mean to—sorry.”

“It’s okay. Come on, let’s come watch something.” 

And Hal let himself be led into the living room, and they curled on Hal’s surprisingly comfortable sofa, though Bruce never did pay any attention to what they were supposed to be watching. They lay entangled in each other’s arms, Hal stretched on top of him. Bruce was careful not to let the kissing escalate too much. They would kiss for a while, and then stop, and Bruce took deep careful breaths, ratcheted his body down. Hal’s head lay on his chest, watching the movie. Bruce just nuzzled Hal’s hair, breathed in the smell of him. 

“You’re not watching,” Hal murmured.

“Yes I am. Bogart just told Brigid that when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It’s the Maltese Falcon, I’ve seen it a thousand times.”

“Really? I’ve never actually watched it.”

“You should, it’s astonishing. The scene where Gutman tells Spade the history of the Falcon is a seven-minute unbroken shot, a record unbroken until Hitchcock used a series of ten-minute shots for Rope in 1948.”

Hal raised his head. “You’re a movie buff.”

“Not really. Alfred used to watch a lot of old films, and late at night I would watch with him.”

“Your parents didn’t make you go to bed, or is bedtime for poor kids?”

“No, this was. . .” He ran a finger through the thick fall of Hal’s hair. It was longer than he had ever seen it, because of course Hal wasn’t having to worry about wearing a flight helmet these days. “This was after they died. I had trouble sleeping. Alfred would let me stay up with him, and we would watch old movies. He told me things about them.”

Hal took his hand and turned it to the palm, kissed it. He re-settled his head, and Bruce resumed stroking it. And then Hal raised up, and kissed him long and deep. “Watch the movie,” Bruce murmured against his lips. Hal watched off and on, and they kissed desultorily and it was in fact one of the most magical nights he had ever spent, and would have been perfect if it weren’t for the fact that Hal was lying stretched on top of him and had been for hours and God, that perfect body was giving him the perfect amount of pressure, and no amount of steady, slow breathing or firm concentration on Peter Lorre’s scowl was going to keep him from being hard as a rock after a certain amount of time. He tried to shift so it was less noticeable, but even his breathing was probably enough of a tell, after a while. 

“Can you move, I need to go to the bathroom,” Bruce said. Hal rolled to the side and propped on his elbow. He kept an arm firmly around Bruce’s waist though. “Hal,” he said. 

“Hey remember that no bullshit thing?”

“I do. Move so I can go to the bathroom.”

“Are you going to the bathroom to jack off?”

He hesitated. That had, in fact, been the plan. “So how about you don’t do that,” Hal murmured, and his hand worked its way between them, down, down to cup Bruce through his jeans. His mouth opened, and he was aware he was panting. The heel of Hal’s hand pressed into him, and he gasped. 

“You’re a little cranked,” Hal said, and Bruce swallowed, tried to keep his breathing normal, but Hal’s hand—and he had been hard so long—

“Stop,” he said pushing Hal’s hand away. 

“Why? You close?”

“I’m not here for—we don’t need to do that.”

Hal glanced down at the stiff bulge in Bruce’s jeans. “Looks like someone didn’t get the memo.”

“I’m fine.”

Hal’s eyes traveled up his body and back down again, a long assessing gaze. “Yes you are,” he said. His deft fingers had unbuttoned Bruce’s jeans, and he didn’t have the strength to stop him. “Silk boxers under jeans,” Hal said. “You’re a walking cliché, but you’re also a walking wet dream, because Jesus Christ look at you.” He was palming Bruce through his underwear now, and Bruce could hear how loud his breathing was. Hal ran a hand up underneath his shirt.

“You take this off?”

Bruce complied. He pulled at the edge of Hal’s shirt, and Hal took his off too, and God, but that chest. Thick and tan and glorious. He couldn’t help it, he pulled Hal back on top of him so he could feel the weight of him, could feel that chest against his. Hal’s hand was still working him, and now he had his cock free of underwear, and his cock was rubbing up against Hal, pressing into Hal’s hand. 

“Hal,” he managed. “I am—I’m not really going to last.”

The quirk of Hal’s lip was predatory. “No, you’re not, are you,” he said, and Hal’s finger stroked up and down his shaft, and at that Bruce did cry out, but fucking God, how could he not. How could he not. He was so wet, he knew he must be soaking Hal’s finger. And then Hal lifted the finger, and put it in his mouth, and sucked on it, closing his eyes, and Bruce thought he might cum just like that, without a hand on him.

“Hey Bruce.”

“Y-yes.”

“If there were something I wanted, would I get it?”

“Yes.”

“Anything?”

“Yes.”

“Then lie there and do not fucking move.” And Hal slid down his body, and down, and then Hal’s mouth was hovering over his cock, his cock which could not stop leaking and throbbing and God, aching. Hal was studying his cock, and the way it strained upward for him. 

“You think if I put that in my mouth,” Hal mused, “you might cum?”

“If you—did that—I couldn’t stop,” he panted. 

Hal’s eyes flicked up, and they were heavy-lidded and hungry. “I think that would be something to see,” he said. “You not able to stop.”

“Hal,” he said, a small broken sound.

Hal took his tongue, the broad flat of it, and licked him up and down. “Stop, God, stop,” Bruce groaned. 

“Really?”

“No, I just—please,” he said, which was entirely unintelligible, but Hal seemed to understand it, because the next thing he did was lower his whole warm mouth onto Bruce’s cock, and Bruce cried out and that was the point at which he surrendered his last bit of control. He gripped Hal’s bare shoulders and thrust, and thrust, and then he couldn’t stop himself and was just fucking Hal’s delicious mouth, made more delicious by the low moan of Hal’s pleasure at it. He came down Hal’s throat in a hot river, gasping and choking for air. It was possible he had never cum so hard in his life, and it felt like it went on forever—like he could just fuck Hal’s sweet mouth forever, until he fell back shaking and dizzy against the sofa cushions, the room spinning around him. Goddammit he had not meant to do that. 

But Hal was climbing up him, Hal was breathing hard and shaky, Hal was pressing against him. “Me please,” he gasped in Bruce’s ear, and Bruce quickly got his hand in between them, popped open Hal’s jeans, and slipped his hand around Hal’s cock. “Fuck,” Hal moaned. 

“Mouth or hand,” Bruce whispered, and Hal managed a broken “This—this—fuck, just this,” as he fucked into Bruce’s hand. Bruce held him hard, wrapped a leg around him to anchor him, and the sweet rasp of Hal’s ragged breath in his ear as he fucked against him—it was indescribable. Hal had a hand on his face, was pulling his face closer, was kissing him messily, kissing him as he fucked him, and then Hal’s breath caught, and there was warm wet in between them where he was cumming, cumming into Bruce’s hand. He rested his forehead on Bruce’s as he slowly spiraled down, and Bruce also felt the smaller jerks and shudders that might have been his descent from orgasm, or might have been seizures, he couldn’t tell. 

“Can we move to the bed,” Bruce whispered, and Hal nodded, hauled himself up. He shucked off his pants and stood there naked, and Bruce wiped his hand on one of their shirts and did the same. He let Hal lead him back to the bedroom, and they fell onto the bed, still twined around each other, or twined again, and Hal did not stop kissing him.

“Hey how does it end?” Hal said.

“How does what end?”

“The Maltese Falcon.”

“This is really what you want to talk about?”

“No. I just wanna hear your voice,” Hal said, and they were kissing again, and Bruce was laughing.

“You can’t hear my voice if your tongue is down my throat,” he said, and Hal was laughing now too.

Sometimes life was like stepping through a curtain in a dim gray room, and on the other side of the curtain was a warm golden afternoon of perfect happiness, like a shimmering jewel box that you had stepped inside. That was what that night was like, when he looked back on it later. He hadn’t known then that it was the last and only time they would be together like that—at the time, he thought it was the beginning, not the ending. He had truly thought that whatever this strange thing was between them, they would figure it out. He himself hadn’t known what was happening to him for such a long time, and it was impossible for him to believe that it would all be taken away from him before he had truly had a chance even to know and understand it, much less enjoy it. But maybe in some part of him he had known. Maybe that was what was lying behind their desperation that night to touch, to possess, to crawl inside each other’s skin if they could. It wasn’t even about the sex. “Look, there’s no way in fuck my body’s doing that again,” Hal had said, but he had said it with a rueful smile, and there was no shame behind it, and Bruce had kissed him again and had not been ashamed when his own body had demanded more.

* * *

He woke alone in a wide white bed, with California sun pouring in through the window, and he had rolled over and stretched and considered dozing a bit more, but there was something about the house’s stillness that made his eyes open, that made him blink into full wakefulness.

He had no idea where his clothes were, so he padded out to the kitchen naked. And there sat Hal. 

Hal had pulled his jeans back on, and sat bare-chested at the kitchen table. He was smoking, which Bruce didn’t know he did. In the light, the white cross-hatching of scars across his back was more visible than it had been last night. 

Bruce came and sat down at the table with him, and then he saw what Hal was staring at: his ring. It was off his hand, and sitting there on the kitchen table, and Hal was staring at it narrowly while smoking a filterless cigarette. At least he had the window open. 

“Those things’ll kill you,” Bruce said.

“Not in our line of work they won’t.” 

He didn’t take his eyes off the ring though. Bruce just watched him. His face was blank, unreadable. “Did you get some rest?” Hal said.

“You know I didn’t,” Bruce said, and Hal’s mouth gave a little twitch at that, but that was the only sign of a smile. He smoked and watched the ring. After a minute or so he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, and set it aside. He looked at Bruce.

“I had a visit from Ganthet this morning,” he said.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Yeah, I know. Ganthet is a Guardian. He’s always been a friend of mine. He doesn’t have a lot of pull on the Council, but there are those who respect him. He gets listened to, sometimes.”

“What did Ganthet have to say?”

“The Guardians want to make a deal.”

Bruce frowned. “A deal? What sort of deal?”

“They’re willing to fix me. Fix everything, actually. You’ve probably figured out there’s a lot more than just bone growth tech on Oa. They can re-grow nerve cells, too. Hell, probably whole people, for all I know. But they can do all the things that Earth medicine can’t do for me. They can re-boot my entire neurological system. No more seizures, no more anything.”

Bruce absorbed that in silence. Sat and stared at the ring along with Hal. “Because they want you back in the field?”

“Among other things, I’m guessing.”

Bruce thought of the anger in that hall, when Hal was being lashed to ribbons. The barely contained thrum of it. Hal’s public punishment had meant to be a yank on the leash of the Corps, but it had been a miscalculation on the part of the Guardians, that much had been clear. They would get Hal Jordan back in the fold, maybe appease the Corps’ resentment. “You said a deal,” Bruce said. “And a deal has two parts. What are you expected to give them? Your loyalty?”

“My memories,” Hal said, and Bruce’s stomach hollowed out. _You’re not serious,_ he almost said, but of course he was. It was brilliant. It was checkmate. 

“Not all of them,” Hal said, still staring down that ring. “Just my memories of the last six months. Just so I never remember what they did to me. So I never remember any of it.”

Bruce’s mouth was dry as sand. They were offering Hal his life back—everything that made him who he was. He could not, would not, open his mouth and ask Hal to turn it down. But he could not say nothing. “This is everything they wanted from the first,” he said hoarsely. 

“Yep,” Hal said. 

“The Guardians need desperately to cover their miscalculation. Punishing you publicly was a mistake. They need to have you back, they need to have you as a loyal Lantern again. They know they can’t have that as long as you know what they did to you.”

“I know.”

“If you say yes to this, then the Guardians—the worst faction of the Guardians—will have won. They will have made the example of you that they needed, and then they still get to have Hal Jordan, ace Green Lantern, out there saving the galaxy and doing the will of the Guardians.”

“I know that too.”

“How long do you have to decide?”

Hal glanced at the kitchen clock. “They’re going to use dimensional transport on me. I have to be ready in a few minutes. They’re expecting me now. I was just waiting for you to wake up.”

“Hal, you nearly died.”

“Yeah, well, not dead yet, as the saying goes.” 

“You could tell them no.”

“I could. But the only way I’m ever going to change things is by being a Lantern again.”

“You have your ring. You _are_ a Lantern.”

“A Lantern who can’t fly,” Hal said. “A Lantern the Guardians will never, ever assign to any mission or sector ever again. You know that and I know that.”

He had nothing to say to that, because Hal’s calculation in every direction was correct. Hal was right; it was an offer he had to take. And who was he to argue that Hal shouldn’t take it—he who had leaped with such eagerness at the offer, when his own life had been handed back to him? He could not sit here now and tell Hal not to take it. It would be obscene, unjust. So he nodded and swallowed against the dryness in his throat. 

He could say _I love you_, and it would be true. But it would not stop Hal, nor should it, and he wouldn’t wield his love like that, like a plea or a demand. A cage to hold him. He knew down to the level of his bones that if he said _I love you_, Hal would without question say _I love you too_. But the truth of those words would not change what was about to happen. 

The kitchen clock ticked-ticked over the stove. Somewhere outside there was a woman’s voice calling to someone. And in another universe, Bruce woke up today and shuffled into the kitchen of Hal’s pleasant little duplex, and Hal was cooking them breakfast, and Bruce came and looped his arms around Hal, who smiled and leaned back against him, and they made plans to spend the rest of the day together—maybe they would go to the beach, or they could lie on blankets in the little park down the street from here, or maybe they would just hang out here. Maybe he would rent more of Alfred’s old movies and teach Hal about them. Hal would love Hitchcock. _Hell yeah I do, it’s got cock right in the name_, Hal would say with a grin, and Bruce would roll his eyes, and they would lie on the sofa like they had last night, and maybe fall asleep there again. A long, golden, perfect day—the beginning of a long, golden, perfect life. 

But that universe was not this one. 

Hal took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, rising. “I need you to do something for me. I need you to make me a promise. Will you do it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Promise me you’ll help me remember. Do you promise me that?”

“You’ll never believe me.”

“Yes I will. I promise you I will. So you promise me.”

“All right. I promise.”

“You’ll have to be my memory when all my memory is gone. I don’t have time to write things down, I don’t have time to—it has to be you. The whole thing, not just parts of it. Will you do it?”

“I will.”

He rose too. Hal glanced up and down him with a grin. “Can I just say, truly and from the bottom of my heart, how glad I am that you are naked right now.”

“You’ve ruined a beautiful moment.”

“Well that’s my life’s work.” He reached for the ring and slipped it on. Twisted it, and he was encased in his uniform again, armored in Lantern glow. And then that glow was wrapped around him too, because Hal had folded him in his arms, and Hal’s mouth was on his—tender, gentle, longing. Bruce kissed him back, and poured everything he had into the kiss. That kiss would never happen again—or maybe it had already happened, maybe it would happen a thousand more times in a thousand different universes. Maybe time and memory and none of it was real, maybe it was all real in different ways, and maybe he could go back and find another way for all of this to have ended. 

“Promise me,” Hal said hoarsely, and Bruce nodded, his eyes locked on Hal’s to the last possible second and beyond. And then Hal had dissolved in a last shimmer of green, and Bruce was left alone in the kitchen in someone else’s house. He stood there for a long time staring at the spot where Hal had been.

After a while he pulled on his clothes, and he washed Hal’s sheets, re-made the bed, and tidied things in the kitchen. He left the house the way he thought Hal might like it to be, when he came back—if he came back—and he straightened the living room, turning out lights and putting pillows back where they had knocked things around last night. The last thing he did was arm Hal’s alarm system. He might have been half out of his mind with lust last night but that didn’t mean his brain had failed to pay attention to a simple security code. 442255, his fingers punched in, and then looking at the keypad he gave a laugh. Hi-Ball. Hal’s call sign. 

He flipped the lights off and went out the front door, shutting the door on the universe he might have inhabited, and stepping into the bright harsh light of the one he did.


	12. Chapter 12

Hal shut the laptop and stayed there for long minutes, his hands steepled as he thought. And then he opened the laptop again, and scrolled to the beginning, and he read the whole thing through once more. He paid attention this time, as he had not been able to before, to Bruce’s careful choice of words. To the adjectives he used, the turns of phrase. To what he omitted, and what he chose to reveal. And when he had finished his second read-through, he sat some more. Sat for at least an hour, watching nothing but the blank screen.

He went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, and he stared at his face in the mirror for a long time. It was three in the morning back on his corner of Earth, but he didn’t doubt that Bruce was awake, and waiting. He pulled the thumb drive out of his laptop and strode quickly out of his quarters, down the hall and down to the next floor. He knew too that Bruce’s door would open at his approach, so he stepped right through and put the thumb drive on Bruce’s desk. 

Bruce was there, as he had known he would be. Waiting for him. And since there would never be a better moment for it, Hal’s fist decked him clean and true, right across the jaw. Bruce staggered back into his desk. 

“So apparently you had that one coming,” Hal said, breathing hard. “And also, what the hell is the matter with you? Like you’ve never heard of _lying?_ You couldn’t have just let me be, you felt it was your goddamn holy duty to remind me of being goddamn tortured by everything I’ve given my life to serve? You just had to make sure I remembered that? Thanks for the secondhand PTSD, you son of a bitch.”

“I made a promise,” Bruce said tightly, holding his jaw. 

“Well, fuck your promise.” Hal stalked to the wide window and stood there, arms crossed. Stood there looking out onto the blackness of space. “And fuck you, while I’m at it.”

“Yes, message received.” He went into the small kitchen area, rummaging with something.

“What are you doing?”

“Putting ice on my jaw, you ungrateful idiot.”

“Oh, _I’m_ ungrateful.”

“Among other adjectives I’m currently contemplating.”

Bruce returned with a cloth held to his jaw. Came and stood next to Hal at the window. Hal scowled into space. “You can corroborate what I’ve said with anyone you like,” Bruce said. “Contact Kilowogg, or Tomar-Re, or anyone in the Corps. Clark, or Leslie, or Barry, anyone in the League could—"

“I don’t need to do that, I said I believe you.”

“Actually what you did was punch me in the face and yell at me.”

“_Because_ I believe you. It was an expression of my trust in you.”

“I’m moved.”

“Oh shut up and let me be angry for a hot minute. Can I just be angry here? I think I get to be angry.”

“At me?”

“Well do you see anyone else around? So yeah, for right now, it’s you. And apparently I was less of a whiny little bitch about it when you hit me, so, you know, maybe shut up about it.” He went back to staring out the window. In a far-off corner of the darkness, he saw a faint streak of distant comet. “I just. . . I just need to think a minute.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“You keep liquor up here?”

“You keep some on the Javelin, so maybe you should suspend judgment.”

Hal snorted. “No, I just – okay, fine, I’ll take a drink.” 

Bruce went back to the kitchen and emerged with two glasses of brown liquid. Hal sniffed at his. “What is it?”

“Well it’s not Cutty Sark.”

Hal knocked it back, and wow, it sure as hell was not Cutty Sark. It slid down his throat like a warm, gentle fire, down into all his veins. “Oh my God,” he said. “Either I have been drinking shit whiskey my whole life or that is really _really_ not whiskey. What the fuck is that?”

“Andallian plum brandy.”

Hal laughed. “So you did smuggle some out. You lying son of a bitch, I notice you didn’t put that part in the story.”

“It didn’t seem relevant.” But Bruce smiled into his glass, and downed some of the brandy too. Hal finished his off and set it down. He couldn’t help but think of what had apparently happened the last time he and Bruce had shared some Andallian liquor, but he pushed that aside for now because if he started thinking about that – if he really stopped to think things like, _Bruce knows what I sound like when I cum and yet here he is sharing a drink with me like this is a perfectly normal thing to know_, his brain would break.

Actually he was pretty sure his brain was breaking anyway. 

He scrubbed at his face to try to clear his head. And then he was just resting his head in his hands, swaying with exhaustion there by the window. “What will you do?” Bruce said.

“I dunno,” Hal said. “In the short term, try to get some sleep. And then when I wake up. . . when I wake up, head to Corps headquarters. I need to confer with Tomar, he’s got a better head on his shoulders than Kilowogg. Then talk to Ganthet. First thing is, make sure that fucking arbitration bullshit gets wiped off the books forever. No one else is ever gonna go through that again.”

“Agreed.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for the agreement I guess, but this has zero to do with you or the League.”

“I understand that.”

Of course, that wasn’t exactly right either, was it. He thought of what Bruce had written – of what it had been like to stand there and watch someone go through that. It didn’t have zero to do with Bruce. And he tried to imagine what it would be like to have to stand there and watch someone do that to Bruce, to watch him be tortured like that. It made his stomach churn. It surprised him, the sharp spike of nausea at that. Maybe that was the Andallian hooch. 

“I guess the real thing is, Tom and Kilowogg and I and—I guess a coalition of Lanterns, we’ll need some serious muscle behind this—we can go to Ganthet, and we can figure out how to persuade the Guardians to actually share tech. Because right now that’s Lantern blood protecting Oan tech, but we don’t get a say in how and when it’s used. We don’t have any sort of system where Lanterns can say hey, I know a situation where this tech would be useful, I need access to this. If we had a system like that in place – if we had had that, your story would have been a lot shorter.”

“It would have,” Bruce said. 

And Hal gave a short laugh, because he thought of the part where Bruce had said that about thanking him with a diner’s card to Applebee’s, or a gift basket of Pepperidge Farm cheese. He hadn’t realized until he had taken a deep dive inside Bruce’s head what his sense of humor was actually like – how strange and off-kilter and wry. You wouldn’t know it just by looking at him. 

“And I guess in order for all that to happen,” Hal said, “we need to figure out how to re-make the relationship between the Guardians and the Corps so this whole bullshit situation doesn’t ever happen again.”

“That sounds like a plan to me.”

“No, it sounds like goals, not a plan, and you’re always yelling at me about the difference between the two. But I’ll figure it out. The one thing I can’t do is nothing. I can’t just pretend none of it ever happened. I might not remember any of it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what happened.”

“If the League can help in any way, let us know. We stand ready to support you.” 

“I know that. And thank you. Thank you for. . . for keeping your promise. And, you know, sorry for punching you in the face.”

“I’ll get over it.”

Hal glanced at him standing there, looking as much like a blank wall as ever. _About as much personality as gray jello_, he had laughed to Ollie once. Except now he knew that wasn’t exactly true. Wasn’t even close to true. He thought of the person who had written that story, the person he had met in those pages – all the wry self-knowledge of that person, and the courage it had taken to bare himself like that. The powerful emotion pulsing under all of it. He stared back out into space. He wondered if the Corps was under orders not to discuss any of the last six months with him. God, the thought of standing in front of the Guardians now and having to pretend he didn’t know. Of being the good, obedient soldier. Well, fuck that. That was who he really wanted to punch in the face, was the Guardians, in all their smug little blue faces. 

“I’ll give you this,” he said. “You are one hell of a writer.”

“It’s one hell of a story.”

“That it is,” Hal agreed. He squinted off into the distance. Sometimes from up here you could just catch sight of the neighboring sector. He wondered what it would be like to just see space, and not see territories and political divisions and Lantern sectors. “I’m sorry I don’t. . . sorry I don’t remember any of it.”

“It’s all right.”

“I mean I guess there are some parts I’m glad I don’t remember. Other parts I wish I did.” He rested his arm against the glass, peered into the blackness. “I’m sorry I don’t remember the you and me parts,” he said. “Because I think that would be. . . really something, to remember that.”

Bruce didn’t have an answer to that, apparently. Hal looked at him. “Do you—I mean, is it. . . I know this was like, months ago. You might have – I mean, some of the stuff you wrote, it made it sound like you. . . like that was still stuff you felt.”

The barest twitch of something on Bruce’s face. “What I feel hasn’t changed,” he said. “But please don’t think I wrote any of that as some plea to—I wouldn’t want you to think that. I promised you the whole story, not just parts of it.”

“I know.” He let his eyes skate to Bruce’s lips. He wondered what it would feel like to kiss him. Contact with the unthinkable. The impossible. Only the impossible had held him in his arms. Had touched him, had caressed him, had said impossible things to him. 

The room took a little lurch to the left. Either the Watchtower had just slipped out of orbit a little bit, or he was dead on his feet. 

“You’re exhausted,” Bruce said. 

“Yeah, I haven’t slept since yesterday. Stayed up reading some asshole’s Justice League fanfic till two in the fucking morning.”

“I thought you were good for thirty-eight hours of no sleep?”

“Yeah well, I might have exaggerated that number by just a little bit.”

The twitch of Bruce’s mouth was definitely a smile, this time. “You should lie down here and try to get some rest. The sofa’s comfortable, believe me, I’ve slept on it more times than I can count.”

“Yeah okay,” Hal said, because it had all just hit him like a wall, and he knew for a fact he could not drag his feet one more step. It wasn’t just the physical exhaustion either – it was the mental exhaustion of trying to take all this in. His brain was coming to pieces under the weight of it. 

“I think I’ll take you up on that,” he said, and collapsed on Bruce’s long curved sofa – and what the hell, how come the furniture in Bruce’s quarters was like nine thousand times nicer than the furniture anywhere else on the Watchtower, what the hell was up with that – and was asleep almost immediately. That was one thing the military really did for you, was train you to sleep anywhere, in any position, and wake up like you had just had ten hours on a pile of silk and goose-down. Which come to think of it Bruce probably had on his bed, the selfish asshole, and here he had just offered him the sofa.


	13. Chapter 13

He woke to utter clarity. He was completely awake, in five seconds, like there had been a loud sound in the next room, except the sound had been in his brain. Someone—Bruce—had put a blanket over him while he slept. And then he remembered what the sound was. It had been his dream, and his brain was trying to tell him something about that dream. His brain was yelling at him. _Wake the fuck up moron_. “Holy shit,” he said, kicking off the blanket. 

He pushed back the door to Bruce’s sleeping quarters. “Hey wake up,” he said, “I gotta tell you something.” He sat on the edge of Bruce’s bed. “Bruce,” he said loudly. 

Bruce groaned and rolled away from him. What an infant. “Come on,” Hal said, poking at him. “Come on, I’m serious, you’re gonna want to hear this.”

“Jordan, I just got to sleep,” came the murderous growl from underneath the pillow. Hal lifted the pillow like he was lifting a rock to see what lived underneath it. 

“Okay,” he said, “so I keep having the same dream. Like, every night since I came back from Oa, I’m having this dream. I forgot about it until this morning, because I just had it again. Come to think of it, how long was I actually on Oa? Because my memory says six weeks, but something tells me that’s not right.”

Bruce cracked an eye. “Six months,” he croaked, and that hit Hal in the stomach. 

“Jesus Christ. Six _months?_”

“Could we talk about this in a few hours?”

“No, this is important, come on, sit up and pay attention here. In this dream I’m having—”

Bruce groaned again, and emerged on the other side of the bed, flinging back the covers and stalking to the bathroom. Hal had fleetingly wondered if maybe he slept naked, which sadly he did not. Or maybe he did, but he didn’t last night, and that was because Hal was here. And it hit him again, the weirdness of it; here he was interacting with Bruce like everything was totally normal, and they had actually fucked. Or. . . what had they done, actually? Bruce had been a little fade-to-black on some of those logistics, which fair. 

He came back from the bathroom scrubbing at his face with a towel. His hair was sticking up all over the place, and his eyes were angry slits in his face. Maybe he wasn’t kidding about that whole just gone to sleep thing. “Okay,” Hal said. “So my dream.”

Bruce sat heavily on the bed beside him. “Your dream,” he said.

“So the thing is, it’s not really _about_ anything. Nothing really happens. I don’t even know where I am. I wake up and I’m in this big room, this huge bed, but I’m scared – like, I’m me, but I’m also this little kid. And I go down this hallway, and the hallway is huge and has all these like, dark scary doors off it, and I go down this hallway and like a bunch of stairs and it seems like it takes forever, but I always get to this one place in the dream. I get to this room, this big bright room where there’s a sofa and like, a couple of comfy chairs maybe? And the walls are yellow. Anyway, the point is, there’s somebody there. A man, I can’t really—I don’t know who. He’s young though. And I curl up and I sleep on the sofa there, next to the guy. There’s a TV, and we’re watching something on the TV. That’s it. That’s the whole dream. I just watch TV with some guy.”

Bruce was staring at him. “It’s not a dream,” he said.

“It’s not, is it,” Hal said, leaning forward. “It’s not a dream, it’s a memory. It’s your memory.”

“When I was young,” Bruce said. “At night, when I couldn’t sleep, or I would get scared, I would—”

“You would go find Alfred and watch old movies with him. That’s the memory, isn’t it? That’s what I’m seeing? You said it in the story. You said Alfred used to watch a lot of old films, and late at night you would watch with him.”

Bruce nodded, frowning. “I don’t understand,” he said. 

Hal held up his right hand, with the ring on it. “This,” he said. “It’s because of this. When we used the tech on your back, it required Lantern force to activate. And you said, you said that you saw things in me – that you were inside my head for like a split second, that you _were_ me.”

“You’re saying that went both ways,” Bruce said. 

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. I mean. . . I can’t describe it. But it’s possible that there was this. . . connection. And that it didn’t really break, or maybe it. . . extended through time, or something? Because the thing to know about the Lantern force is that it doesn’t operate strictly according to the rules of Einsteinian space/time, is the thing. So if the connection is there, and it’s forged by the Lantern force—”

“Then I might have your memories,” Bruce said. 

“Yes! Like there’s this—like a kind of bridge between us, okay, like a Rainbow Bridge that—”

“A Rainbow Bridge?”

“Move beyond it, bad metaphor, did not mean to make it sound like we’re euthanizing Golden Retrievers here or something.”

“What in God’s name are you even talking about?”

“I’m talking about, I might be able to use the Lantern force to access those memories. That maybe, if there’s like a, okay, let’s call it a highway between us, then maybe my memories could travel back this way on that highway. Because look—if I’m having this dream that is actually a memory of yours, then it stands to reason I’ve got more of your memories stored somewhere in my brain, and when the Guardians fucking bleached my brain, maybe your memories didn’t get destroyed because they didn’t register as memories, right, they weren’t really _mine_ exactly, only now my brain doesn’t know what to do with them, can’t make sense of them, so they surface as dreams, right?”

Bruce crossed his arms. “I’m worried that this makes a kind of sense to me.”

“There’s one problem though.”

“Only one?”

“If I connect us again, I don’t know—I mean, before, there was the bone growth tech acting as like a, what do you call it, a buffer between your body and the Lantern force.”

“But this time there wouldn’t be.”

“Right. And it might be—I dunno, it might not be such a good idea. Actually, the more I think about this, the more I think it’s a terrible idea. Okay, never mind actually. It is a terrible idea. Go back to sleep. I’m glad we had this talk.” And he started to get up. Bruce’s hand pulled him back down. 

“Wait just a minute,” he said. “Why do you think this is a terrible idea? Thirty seconds ago you thought it was a genius idea.”

“Yeah, well, this is an idea that comes at considerable risk to you. And I’m not pulling you in to any more of my shit.”

“Hal. If there’s even a chance that you could have your memories back, we need to pursue that.”

Hal got up, paced the room, scrubbed at his hair. No. No no no, this was not what he had meant to do. The more he thought about it, the more he began to grasp the kind of risk Bruce would be taking, exposing himself to the raw Lantern force like that. “No,” he said. “I won’t do it. I’m sorry, I got too worked up thinking about it, but no, we’re not doing it. I’m not doing it.”

“You would be controlling the Lantern force, correct? Channeling it through your ring?”

“Yeah, but I’ve never done something like this before. It’s just a theory. I could really, really hurt you, I could—”

“I trust you.”

Hal stopped pacing. “I’ve never connected to anyone through the ring before. You’ve never experienced what that even feels like. You have no idea if you should trust me on this or not.”

“Well how about this. We will be telepathically linked, right? If it’s too much, if I can’t take it, then I can tell you to stop. We will be in communication the whole time, yes?”

“That’s the idea, but we have no way of knowing if—”

“Excellent, then let’s get started.”

Hal came and sat down beside him on the bed again. It wasn’t silk and goose-down like he had thought. Just plain cotton sheets and a rough blanket. “You’re serious?” he said.

“I am. I think your theory’s a sound one, if a bit eccentrically expressed. And I trust you to know how to execute it.”

“Maybe we should get Leslie to monitor you, some sort of supervision here in case—”

“You’re stalling. Let’s get going.”

Hal nodded. “Okay, you should probably lie down, and I could maybe—hang on,” he said. “There’s something I need to do first.”

“Which is?”

“I need to tell you something.”

“All right.”

Now that it came to it, he was nervous about it. But then he remembered the way Bruce had laid his chest bare in everything he had written for Hal, and hadn’t flinched at it. “Okay, so the thing is this. About the. . . the other stuff, the stuff between you and me.”

“Hal, you don’t need to—”

“Please let me finish. So the thing is, when I read all that, it wasn’t—I mean, it wasn’t maybe the huge shock you were thinking it would be. I didn’t read those things and think, ugh, gross, where did this come from, is what I’m saying.”

“Well. Not actively repulsed is a low bar, but I’m happy to have met it.”

“Could you stop being a smartass for like five seconds here. What I’m trying to say is, even before all of this, like way before the mission to Andallia and all of that. I was always attracted as fuck to you. And I knew that I was. So yeah, it makes total sense to me that I would get drunk and climb you like a tree. I’m saying that did not come out of nowhere.”

Bruce said nothing. “I could also really see myself getting in a lot deeper than just fucking around,” Hal continued. “The feelings part. I could see that happening in a red-hot minute. None of that was the hard part for me to believe, in what you wrote.”

Bruce was studying the floor intently. Hal wondered if he was maybe saying the wrong thing, or not saying it in the right way. “And I guess what I’m saying is, if this doesn’t work. . . if I don’t get my memories back, can we still—I mean, just give me a while to catch up, okay? If you meant what you said yesterday about. . . about still feeling the same way, that is. Could you please say something, because I can’t tell if this is your ‘I want to commit a murder’ face or just your ‘I haven’t had coffee yet’ face.

“Those are not different faces.”

“Bruce—”

Bruce’s hand covered his. Holy shit, so Bruce was sitting here holding his hand. That was a thing that was happening. His hand was warm and firm. “Take all the time you need,” Bruce said quietly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay cool,” Hal said. “Just wanted to. . . you know, get that out there. You still in to try this?”

“I’m still in.”

“Let the record show this is the first and only time you have ever told me you agreed with a plan that I came up with. All right I guess you should—I dunno. Maybe lie down?”

“All right.” Bruce stretched out on the bed. 

“Okay, and I’ll be—well I don’t actually know. Was I standing last time? Or maybe we should both be standing. Not sure if the distance between us matters? Or maybe the angle. I should—”

“Jordan. Just do it.”

Hal took a deep breath. “You sure?”

“For God’s _sake_.”

“All right all right, just checking. Here goes nothing.” And he extended himself into the ring, breathed outward and let the tendrils of his ring-self brush against Bruce. If he could remember having done this before, it would be helpful, but of course he couldn’t. But from what Bruce had written about it, it sounded like there had been a focal point – like he had focused the power of the ring right at the point in Bruce’s body where the spinal injection had been. So maybe if he tried that same point now. . . 

There was a feeling like the wind being sucked out of him, like all of him being sucked into a powerful current. That was it—not a bridge or a highway, but a river, that was what he had been missing, it was a _river_. The current was too strong for him; he had to brace his feet, had to fight for air. And then a wave came crashing over him, and he couldn’t breathe anymore, couldn’t find which way was up. He was supposed to be looking out for Bruce, supposed to be monitoring Bruce—where was Bruce? He tried to shout his name but there was only green everywhere, all around him. He was drowning, and he was failing Bruce, he was going to end up killing Bruce, no no no this could not be happening, he could not be fucking this up, if Bruce were hurt—

With the last ounce of strength in him he reached his arm out and grabbed hold of something, grabbed hold of Bruce’s arm. His fingers sank into the warmth, the solidity that was Bruce. Bruce was shouting something at him. 

_This is not special share time or an exciting new chapter in our non-existent friendship_, he shouted. _Don’t stop touching me what were the injuries from I understand the difference between knowing a thing is so, and wishing it so—_

And then there was something pulling Hal from the middle of his body, like a fist tangled in his gut, and it was pulling him inside Bruce, and he tried to stop it, tried to gulp air, tried to keep the power of the ring from tearing Bruce apart from the inside, only he failed, he failed, he failed like he had always failed at everything, and the blackness came up to swallow him and closed over his head.

* * *

He woke on the floor. He had a hard time figuring out where he was for a second—for longer than a second actually. His head was throbbing. Maybe he had hit it on something when he went down. 

“Ow ow fucking ow,” he moaned. There were firm arms helping him sit up. He sat all the way up and then—

“Shit,” he said weakly, and staggered up, staggered into the bathroom. He fell to his knees and emptied his guts into the toilet. He retched and heaved, and then he heaved some more. The pain in his head was like knives. The room was spinning. When there was nothing more in him he fell back against the cold tile of the wall. There was a cloth wiping his face, a glass of water nudging his lips. He drank gratefully. 

“Never. . .fucking. . .doing that. . . again,” he said, but it was more of a croak. His eyes felt swollen. The light of the bathroom hurt them. This was one thousand percent the worst hangover he had ever had. 

“You almost killed yourself,” Bruce’s voice said. “So much for remaining in control.”

“Oh shut up,” Hal said, and he hauled himself up, squinting around him. There was a cabinet over the bathroom sink and he opened it. “Jesus Christ my mouth feels like a bus station bathroom, give me your toothbrush.” 

He fumbled along the shelf until he found something toothbrush-shaped, and some toothpaste. He scrubbed at his mouth and rinsed and spat and brushed, and rinsed and spat and brushed again. His stomach was still roiling. He glanced at the pharmacy of meds on Bruce’s bathroom shelf – did he have one in every place, like nine different bottles of Thorazine or whatever? He could use a fistful of Zofran right now, that was for sure. He drank down more of the water, which Bruce had set on the rim of the sink beside him. 

“It wasn’t a bad idea,” Bruce said. “It was at least worth a shot.”

Hal scrubbed at his face with a towel. “Oh it worked,” he said. 

“What do you mean it worked?” 

Hal tossed the towel aside. “I mean it worked, what else do you want me to tell you?”

“Do you mean worked in the sense that we both managed to survive, or worked in the—”

Hal barreled into him, slamming him against the bathroom wall. He was just quick enough to do it, and Bruce was just startled enough that he could get the drop on him. Not an easy thing to do. Hal pressed him there, pressed himself against Bruce. Seized Bruce’s face in his hands, and kissed Bruce long and hard. He felt the moment of Bruce melting into him, the moment when Bruce’s body gave into him, let himself be kissed, and then the moment when he was kissing Hal too, and every time Bruce had kissed him was happening right there too, like he could feel that kiss but also all the kisses in back of that kiss – on Andallia, on the rock across from Miramar, in his apartment. That last morning. Hal pulled back, studying Bruce’s face. Bruce’s beautiful eyes stuttered open. 

“You are so fucking, fucking beautiful,” Hal murmured. “And that night at Miramar you were wearing jeans and a long sleeve T shirt, it was dark, like an olive color maybe, and a shirt over top of it. You had the sleeves pushed up, and you were wearing a diver’s watch that was meant to look all hipster and shit but probably cost like fifteen grand.”

“You,” Bruce whispered, and his hands were on Hal’s face now. 

“Yeah baby,” he said with a grin. “Me.” And he bent to kiss him some more, only now Bruce was the one walking him back against the other wall, Bruce’s arms were wrapped around him, Bruce was the one kissing him fiercely, and there was six weeks, six months, six years of hunger and longing behind it. Hal couldn’t get enough, couldn’t taste enough, couldn’t get close enough. It was more like fighting than kissing, they were both so hungry. He hadn’t lied to Bruce when he told him it had worked, but it would have been more accurate to say it _was working_ rather than that it _had worked_, because with every breath he remembered more, and more after that, and then more. His memories were rushing into his brain in layers too fast for him to process – like the aftermath of a dream, only instead of images slipping away from him they were becoming more real, barreling toward him with life and sound and smell and depth, and the shock of it was like being plunged into successive vats of ice water as his brain struggled to take it all in. It was knocking the wind out of him, or maybe that was Bruce’s mouth eating all the air out of his body. And every time he swayed underneath the sensory shock of it all, there was Bruce’s body anchoring him, holding him tight. 

Hal put a hand on his chest, slowing him down, and Bruce raised his head. “All right?” he whispered. Hal nodded, closed his eyes. 

“Yeah, just need—gimme a minute.”

“Let’s come lie down.”

“Yeah, I just—no, let me stay here a sec.” He tipped his head forward to rest on Bruce’s head, and they stood there like that. “What are you thinking,” he whispered.

“I’m thinking if I’d known this was possible, I could have saved myself two weeks of writing.”

Hal whuffed a laugh. “Pretty glad you didn’t,” he said. “I’m gonna be re-reading that a lot, I think. Well, the dirty parts especially.”

“What are you talking about, there were no dirty parts. It was highly literary erotica.”

“Was it meant to get me hot?”

“A totally unintended side effect.”

Hal laughed again. Bruce’s hand was on the back of his neck, holding him there, and it felt so good. He wanted to stay there for the rest of the day. The rest of the week, the rest of his life. “Hey I just thought of something,” he murmured.

“Hmm.”

“So the first time we fucked, you were on like a horse trough of meds and were not at your best, right?”

“Mm hmm.”

“And the next time we fucked, I was the one on all the meds.” Bruce had started a gentle nuzzle at the side of his face. God, he could feel the ache in his groin at it already. “So I’m just thinking,” Hal said, “with us both in what you might call peak condition this time. . .”

Bruce gave a small groan at that, and that one groan unlocked the flood of memories of all Bruce’s other noises he had made in bed with Hal, and what had been a small ache in his groin was now a tight throb, and he let his hands wander to Bruce’s ass—Jesus Christ, Bruce’s ass, what a fucking piece of work that was—and pulled him in. Bruce was wearing nothing but thin sweatpants. _Please wear nothing but this for the rest of your life,_ Hal thought, as Bruce started eating his neck. 

Hal put the hand back on his chest, and held it there. “Here’s the thing,” he said. 

“Please let there not be a thing.”

“Yeah, there’s a thing.” And he twisted his ring, until he was encased in his glowing green uniform. 

“You have got to be kidding me,” Bruce said. 

“Yeah. I know what you’re gonna say.”

“You really do not.”

“Baby. I gotta go kick some ass. The only thing I want to do right now is stay here all day and shove my tongue down your throat and ride your gorgeous ass into next week, but I can’t stay. Not now that I know what I know, if that makes sense. I have to talk to Kilowogg and Tomar and see how much support I’ve got in the Corps. I’ve got a little business to conduct with the assholes on Oa who think torture is the way we do things. People could get hurt if I don’t stop what’s going on. The Corps needs me, and I gotta go do a job.”

Bruce shut his eyes and sighed. “I figured as much,” he said. 

“And the other things is this. If I stay and climb in bed with you, I’m not getting out for at least a week.”

Bruce bent to his neck, breathed him in, grazed a kiss along his jaw. “That had better be a promise,” he said.

“You’re on, beautiful,” Hal said, and he let himself have one more kiss before he tore himself away. “All right, time to save the galaxy, a-fucking-gain,” he sighed.


	14. Epilogue: Fathers and Sons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue: Fathers and Sons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Epilogue: Fathers and Sons**

** EPILOGUE: FATHERS AND SONS **

He hid from the light as long as he could, but it chased him into all the corners of the bed, pried at him under the pillows. The hot relentless fingers of the light kept pushing at him, poking at him. There was something about the light in California; it had it in for him, like a personal vendetta. He gave up and rolled over, surrendered to its pummeling. There was some grating sound somewhere – insult to injury. After a few more minutes of vicious beating, he got up and stumbled into the kitchen. 

“Right? This is what I’m always saying,” Hal said. “No no, I am completely not disagreeing with you on that one.” He had his phone in one hand, and was pushing something around a skillet with the other. That must have been what woke him up, was the sound of Hal’s irritatingly loud voice on the phone. He had thought it was the sunlight. 

“Oh hang on, Sleeping Beauty just roused,” Hal said, with the morning cheerfulness that made Bruce fantasize about kneeing him in the back, and several places more sensitive. He fumbled with the coffeemaker, which was blessedly on, and poured himself a cup. Hal was standing at the stove cooking something, and humming a little to himself while he chattered on the phone. It made Bruce want to beat him with a skillet. 

“Yeah. All right. I’ll let you know. Also, you owe me money on last night’s game. Just so you’re aware. I’m not gonna be bought off. Hah! As if, Dionne. What are you talking about, of course I’m Cher in this scenario. All right, I gotta go, this total Baldwin just walked into my kitchen.” He brayed another laugh. “Yeah yeah, you wish. Okay, I’ll let you guys know about tonight. Yeah you too man. Okay.”

Hal tossed his phone on the table and glanced at Bruce. He laughed again. “Whoops, sorry,” he said, in an unrepentant voice. “Might have gotten a little carried away there last night. Best to go with a collared shirt today.”

“Great,” Bruce rasped. He had just enough coffee in him to have recovered vocal ability, though not enough for higher-order reasoning. 

“Aw babe, come on, it’s a beautiful day. You want some eggs?”

“I do not.”

“Cool. You want hot sauce with your eggs, or just salt and pepper? I stuck some toast in, if you want some.”

Bruce stared out the window above the sink, wondering what it was about California sunlight that was just so particularly. . . aggressive. Relentless. Behind him Hal was whistling while he plated up breakfast, which he set on the table. And then there were arms snaking around him, looped around his waist. Bruce gave a grunt. 

“Hey,” Hal said softly. “I was thinking. I was thinking maybe you and me could go down to the beach today, hang out there a little bit.”

“That’s the place with all the sun?” he said.

“Yeah babe, the place where they keep all the sun. I promise I will coat you in sunscreen. I’ll even get all those hard to reach spots,” he said, trailing light kisses down Bruce’s shoulder. “And all those places you might be a little too sore to reach.”

Bruce grunted, and Hal laughed at him again. Started kissing on his other shoulder. “That was Clark just now,” he said. “He and Lois wanna know about dinner tonight.”

“Mm,” Bruce said. “What on earth were you talking about? Who’s Baldwin?”

“Are you serious right now? For real? Jesus Christ, every time I discover another gap in your education I wanna fucking weep. For someone who claims to care about classic movies you’re kinda stupid about anything after like 1964. I for sure know what we’re watching tonight.”

Bruce sighed. “About today,” he said. 

“Hey no, listen, it doesn’t have to be the beach. There’s that park down the street from here, it’s got lots of shade for vampires like you. We could take blankets and just lie out there. Or if that’s still too much sunlight we can always just hang out here. We can veg on the couch, you could teach me about some of those old movies.”

Bruce turned in his arms. Studied Hal’s face. It was what he had written, all those months ago. Back when he had imagined what a perfect day with Hal would be like, back when he had thought he would never have that, that it was all an impossibility that was not for him to have. And here was the impossibility himself, all six feet and change of lean brown muscle, holding him in his arms and looking at him like. . . looking at him like that. Like he wanted to give him the perfect day. 

“Right,” Bruce sighed. “There’s just. . . a bit of a problem with that.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?” Hal had given him a last kiss on the shoulder and was plating up the eggs now, grabbing the toast, and all this cheerful morning bustle just made Bruce feel like shit for what he was about to have to say. 

“Late last night, after you had gone to sleep. Damian messaged me.”

“Everything okay?”

“No, not actually. He. . .” Bruce rubbed at his forehead. “I am aware that I had said I would be free all day today. That we could. . .” He sighed again. “I have to get back to Gotham.”

“Oh,” Hal said. He stood there with a plate of eggs in his hands.

“Please know that I—”

“Babe. Stop. That comes first, all right? Come on, don’t worry about it. Eat your eggs and we’ll figure it out.”

“Please let me finish a sentence. What I was wondering was—well, let me backtrack a little. I promised Damian we would go upstate for the afternoon, to this horse farm I’m thinking about buying, or that Damian has persuaded me I need to think about buying, just a place where he can run free without decapitating anything or terrifying normal people, with as many animals of whatever kind he likes. I realize that real estate shopping with a pre-teen is not anyone’s idea of a fun way to spend a Saturday, and perhaps especially yours, but I was wondering if—that is, if you might nonetheless like to come with us.”

Hal set his plate down. “You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack. As far as Damian is concerned, the only thing cooler than a farm full of horses is the Justice League. Having the Green Lantern along would make his day, believe me.”

Hal sat down and started eating his eggs. He looked thoughtful. “So is the Green Lantern invited on this outing? Or is Hal?”

“If you’re asking does Damian know about us, the answer is no. But I would very much like it if Hal would join us today.”

Hal was still looking thoughtful. Bruce looked at the floor, and there was a hollow feeling starting in his chest. “I would also understand if that’s moving us in a direction you would rather we not,” he said quietly.

“Oh shut up,” Hal said. “I wasn’t thinking that, I was just thinking I don’t want to piss off Damian by showing up for his day with his dad and being a third wheel. I can’t afford to fuck this up, is all.”

“You’re going to have to trust me that I wouldn’t let that happen.”

Hal made a motion with his head that looked irritatingly like he was weighing that. Like that was something he did not, in fact, trust Bruce to know. He was crunching his toast while he thought. “Why’s he so into the League?” Hal said. “He gets to hang out with Batman on a daily basis, what could be cooler than that?”

“In the first place I’m his father, so by definition I am the opposite of cool, trust me. And in the second place it isn’t really about the Justice League being cool. It’s about. . . he is very possessive of my time. And attention. And the League is the biggest drain on that by far. And I very deliberately shut him out of anything to do with the League.”

“That just a danger thing?”

“It is very much a danger thing.”

“Hmm,” Hal said. He was finishing up his toast, wiping his hands. “But like, if memory serves, Dick was involved in League stuff from the time he was thirteen, right?”

“Damian is not thirteen.”

“He will be next year though, yeah?”

“Time enough to re-visit the issue then. And to be clear, when Dick got involved in League activities that was fifteen years ago, and under very limited circumstances. Not to mention that every child is different, with different strengths and capabilities, as well as weaknesses. I have learned a thing or two since then, especially about how to keep my children safe in the field, but do go on, I’m eager to hear your thoughts on the matter, out of your vast wisdom and experience.”

“Oh you know what stick it up your tailpipe, I’m just trying to figure out more about Damian, is all. No one’s second guessing your parenting, calm the fuck down.”

“I’m quite calm, but it’s increasingly clear that today is not something you would care to do, so—”

“Will you dry the fuck up, of course I’m coming, but Jesus, excuse me for wanting to do my research first. Are horses likely to be involved at some point today?” 

Bruce raised his eyebrows at that. “Well it is a horse farm Hal, I imagine some of them will be present, yes. I thought I might throw some of our tack in the back of the car, in case Damian is interested in some riding.”

“Huh,” Hal said. He was rinsing his dishes in the sink. “So you ride?”

“Occasionally.”

“With like riding clothes and shit?”

“Yes. Why does that matter?”

“No, it’s just. . . I don’t happen to have any fancy riding clothes hanging in my closet, and I sure as shit don’t have a saddle lying around, and I know fuck-all about horses. Your kid is gonna think I’m a complete loser.”

Bruce set his coffee cup down. “All right,” he said. “There are some things you need to know.”

“Look I do not need some patented Batman lecture on—”

“Your turn to shut up. Most of the time when you’ve heard me talk about Damian, it’s been because of some challenge I’m facing with him, or something he’s set fire to, or some problem or other. So it occurs to me there are some things you don’t know about my son, or that you wouldn’t know if all you knew was that he had been raised by assassins. It’s true that there are demons in his head, but he fights them every day. He is kind. He is compassionate, especially to those he thinks he needs to protect, and unexpectedly gentle. He is honest—to a fault—but that honesty comes with a great deal of perception. He’s intensely curious. He has what you might call an unusual imagination, and the ability to make that vision come to life. He’s deeply loyal to his friends. And he wants more than anything to be not just a warrior, but a hero.”

Hal was looking at him strangely. There was an odd little smile on his face. Normally when Ha’s face looked at him like that, it was in the soft angles and corners of the night, when they were naked together, in more ways than one. Rarely in daylight. “What,” Bruce said.

“Nothing. It’s just—I know someone kinda like that, is all.” 

“He’ll be a better man than I am.”

“No,” Hal said, that bemused look still on his face. He picked up Bruce’s hand and kissed it, shutting his eyes. “That’s not. . . they broke the mold, baby.” He took Bruce’s other hand and brought it to his face. And then he did a strange thing—he put Bruce’s hands on his face, cradling his jaw, holding them there. Such a strange, intimate gesture. And daylight was not their usual. 

The truth was, none of this was their usual. They had had so little time together, when you sat down and counted it all up. As soon as he had regained his memory, Hal had left immediately for Oa, and he had been gone four months with little to no word. He had briefed the League the minute he had returned, and he had been successful—or at least, he had laid the groundwork for later success. He had indeed managed to lead the majority of the Lanterns in their demands for greater autonomy. There was now a permanent representative of the Corps who sat in Council with the Guardians; the ancient rule of arbitration had been abolished, so that no one could ever invoke it again; and most importantly, there were even delicate negotiations underway for opening Oan tech to the wider galaxy, under limited circumstances. 

“That’s great work, Lantern,” Clark had said. “You should be proud of everything you and your allies have managed to achieve in such a short time.”

Hal had nodded curtly and quickly moved on to more details of his briefing. But all through the briefing Bruce was paying attention less to what he was saying than to how he looked, and how he looked was tired. Exhausted. Faint lines around his eyes that would probably not ever go away. He had no way of knowing what it had cost Hal to face the Guardians, to walk into their presence knowing everything that he knew, remembering everything that he now remembered. _Fuck you, and thanks for the secondhand PTSD,_ Hal had said when Bruce had told him the truth of what had happened on Oa. There was a decent case to be made that he had been right, that Bruce had done him no favors. 

It was an interesting question, one that in the middle of the night he had no answer for. If it hadn’t been for the memories he desperately wanted Hal to have—the memories of their own odd, disjointed, halting relationship, if that was even the term for it—if it hadn’t been for that, would he really have worked so hard to give Hal his memory back? Maybe the kinder thing would have been to walk away, to let Hal continue in blissful ignorance not only of his own trauma and recovery, but of their intimacy. If he could have figured out a way to give Hal one and not the other, he would have done it, promise or no. But then, if it had been him, he would have wanted to know. No matter the cost to himself, he would have wanted to know the truth. 

Hal had only been back for a month now, and soon after he had come back Bruce had been pulled into a disastrous gun-running investigation that had spanned the entire East Coast, and the time they had together was all too short, snatched here and there. They were still learning their way. Bruce let his hands rest there on Hal’s face, and rubbed at his morning stubble with a thumb. 

“What time do we need to be in Gotham?” Hal murmured, kissing his hands now.

“I told Damian we’d head out of the city about 1.”

“Mm. It’s 11 in Gotham now. Won’t take us more than fifteen minutes to zeta to the Watchtower and then down to Gotham.”

“Depending on what traffic is like on the L.I.E.”

“Hmmm, if only you knew someone who could maybe fly you over traffic and put you down right at your front doorstep.”

“Yes, all while wrapped in an unobtrusive neon green pulsar, that’s sure to be helpful.”

“Hey, I can un-obtrude when I need to.”

Bruce gave a small laugh and pulled Hal’s hands down, only to wrap them around his waist. Their kissing was gentle, tentative. Sometimes he forgot how new a thing this was, because Hal felt so deeply a part of him, it was like he had always been there. “So what you’re saying is, we have an hour,” Bruce said softly.

“That’s what I’m saying. You have put your finger on the essence of what I’m saying. You have located my point. You have—”

“Shut up,” Bruce murmured, and kissed him again. Then he clasped Hal’s hand and pulled him after him to the bedroom. 

“You sure you don’t wanna try the kitchen again?” Hal said.

“I do not. And how you can eat at that table after the other day I have no idea.”

Hal laughed, and Bruce pushed him onto the bed and climbed on top of him. Worked down both their pants so they were more or less naked. He held Hal’s arms pinned above his head while he did it—no small feat of dexterity on his part—and kept Hal pressed firmly underneath him. Bruce tightened his grip on Hal’s wrists, and the faintest tremor ran through Hal’s body. His smile had faded, and Bruce instantly released him. Idiot. Fucking idiot. Like a lightning shot he saw Hal tied by his wrists to that glowing blue archway, and he was a fucking, fucking idiot. 

“Sorry,” he murmured. He bent his forehead to Hal’s.

“’S fine. Just kiss me, yeah?”

Sometimes, when he was kissing Hal, he thought about the connection between them that the ring had forged – the river, Hal had called it, when talking to him about it afterward. And a river had continual flow. So maybe it was possible that the connection between them was still there, was still open in some sub-atomic way that was beyond either of their conscious ability to track, was still moving between them. Or maybe that was backwards: maybe the ring had been able to forge that connection because a pathway already existed, one they themselves had forged. However it had come to be, standing in that hall watching them torture Hal – it had felt like it was his own flesh being ripped apart, his own body being torn to pieces like that. And sometimes when they kissed, he could feel the flow of that river under his feet. Or maybe that was just what love felt like, and he hadn’t known. 

Their fucking this morning was quiet and intent. Plenty of times it was neither – Hal was as mercurial in bed as out of it, and there was never any telling what he would be in the mood for, but most of the time it seemed to require about six hours, regular water breaks, and fifty square feet of space in all directions, and God help you if you hadn’t taken your vitamins beforehand and prepped with regular work-outs. Not once in all his years of fucking around with a list of partners anyone would have to admit topped out in the hundreds, had Bruce ever found someone who could keep up with him, or whose hunger for sex was as insatiable as his own. But damn if Hal couldn’t give him a run for his money. And Hal hadn’t been kidding about the “climbing in bed for a week” thing, back when he had first returned from Oa. Bruce had taken him to the penthouse and they had fucked themselves stupid on every available surface, and afterwards the place had looked like a trashed hotel suite from the last Metallica tour. He hadn’t actually been aware how tight a leash he was keeping on his own libido until Hal had snapped his collar. 

But this morning that wasn’t what Hal wanted, and what Hal wanted in bed, Hal got. _If there were something I wanted, would I get it_, Hal had asked him once, and Bruce had groaned and said, _anything._ It was a bargain he had kept. 

This morning Hal pulled away from Bruce’s hungry mouth and bent down to rummage in the bedside drawer, half on and half off the bed. “Oh come on,” Hal sighed. “Fuck, where is it?”

Bruce raised his head. “Hang on,” he said, sliding off the bed and padding into the living room. He was having some sort of sense memory about where they had used it last, but details were hazy. “Ah ha,” he said to himself, and lifted the sofa, shifting it a few feet away from the wall to grab the vial of lube behind it. He came back to the bedroom, tossing his quarry on the bed in triumph.

“The living room?” Hal said, mystified. 

“The case just required the skills of a trained investigator.”

Hal laughed, and pulled Bruce down on top of him, and he sank back into Hal’s arms. “So tell me what you want me to do with it,” he murmured. 

“Mmm.” Hal rolled them over so he was on top, and he started a slow grind. Bruce groaned at it. 

“Yeah?” Hal whispered. “That what you want?” He knew from experience he absolutely could cum, just from Hal grinding on him, and by experience he meant, yesterday. Hal could do this thing with his hips, just a slow roll and undulation, never speeding up, that would have Bruce hard in seconds, gasping on the knife-edge of cumming in minutes. He would do it with his eyes locked on Bruce’s, pupils blown, his mouth so close, so close—Bruce would lean up to seize Hal’s mouth with his, just to breathe his air, and the shift in pressure on his cock would just make the pleasure that much more intense, that much more unbearable. 

He had learned in the negotiations on Andallia that Hal was a keen observer, for all that he tried to mask it. The thought that Hal was turning all that power of observation on him, and on ways to make him cum his brains out, was. . . .

“Yes,” Bruce gasped. “This.”

Hal’s mouth gave a wicked quirk. “Yeah, sorry babe,” he said. “I have something else in mind.” And he rolled off him, grabbed the lube, and pressed it into Bruce’s hand. 

“I know you’re all about the grind,” he said, “but I’m in the mood for a good fuck, and I think you’re just the person to give it to me. Now, you gonna do what I say?” His finger was playing with a bit of Bruce’s hair, but his eyes were heavy and predatory.

“Yes,” Bruce said. 

Hal leaned close, brushed his lips against Bruce’s ear. “Good boy,” he whispered. He reached for the lube and got some on his hand, then handed it back to Bruce. “Thought I might help out a little,” he said, and he let his hand run slowly up and down Bruce’s shaft, coating him with the lube. Bruce closed his eyes and bit back a groan at it. Pressed his fingertips into the mattress.

“Don’t you dare cum.”

“Then stop.” 

“Or, you could develop some self-restraint.” It was his Batman voice, which Hal was irritatingly good at. 

“Fuck you,” Bruce gasped. 

“Oh that’s where we’re headed, don’t you worry.” Hal’s hand was warm and steady, and Bruce sank into it. Every time his breathing accelerated, Hal would pause for a minute, let him ratchet it back down. Bruce rode the waves, and hoped his control of his body would be enough—morning was not usually the best time to test that theory. Once Hal’s pause was longer than usual, and Bruce opened his eyes to find Hal propped on an elbow, studying him. 

“What are you doing,” he croaked. 

“Enjoying the view,” he said thoughtfully. “Watching you let go is a sight that never gets old, trust me.”

“Please. Don’t. . . stop.”

“Mm, well, I’m gonna. Or I could just put my mouth on you. I’m considering it. But I hate the taste of lube.”

“I’ll go wash.”

“What are you talking about, you couldn’t make it to the bathroom with that thing. You couldn’t make it through the doorway, you’re gonna punch holes in the wall.” And he ran an idle finger down Bruce’s weeping cock. Bruce swallowed, licked his lips.

“Hal,” he said. 

“Nah, I mean you’re probably right. This is solid post-war construction. That’s at least two inches of plaster on oak framing, because nineteen-forties building codes were not fucking around. I mean even your cock is gonna have a hard time knocking down one of my walls.”

“_Hal_,” he panted, because that finger had become two, had a become a steady unbearable rub, he was so close—

Hal was on top of him, his mouth at Bruce’s ear. “Don’t—you—_fucking_—cum,” he said through gritted teeth, and Bruce groaned. He gripped Hal’s ass and flipped them over, grinding into Hal’s stiff cock, and Hal gave that delicious laugh, that long low sun-drenched one, the one he bit at his throat to taste, the one that warmed his lips and his skin. 

What Hal wanted, Hal got. He fucked Hal the way Hal wanted this morning—quiet and slow. Hal lay on his stomach, eyes closed, breathing deep and serene. The morning sun slanted across his flawless back, the warm golden expanse of muscle that Bruce couldn’t stop kissing, rubbing his face against. He stretched a hand out and laced his fingers in between Hal’s. 

“Good?” he whispered.

“So fucking good,” Hal sighed. “Don’t stop.”

He had no intention of it, and really he would have been fine except that Hal started moving. Started grinding into the mattress beneath him. “Don’t,” Bruce said.

“Don’t move?”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

“Because—” He broke off, closed his eyes. God, Hal grinding himself underneath him. The clench of Hal’s fist. The arch of Hal’s ass. “You want me not to cum,” he said. 

“You won’t.”

“You know this how?”

“Because I told you not to.”

He ran his fingers through Hal’s hair, gripped it and pulled Hal’s neck back to his mouth. “Such a little dom,” he growled, but Hal’s laugh was more of a groan. 

No sound in the house but Hal’s slow breathing, matched by his own exhale. He let Hal fuck himself like he wanted, long and slow, back onto Bruce’s cock, forward into the mattress, and when Hal began fucking the mattress underneath him in earnest, Bruce closed his eyes and tried to slow his own breathing, tried to hold on as long as Hal needed him to. “Don’t cum,” Hal gasped, and Bruce had no words, just bent his head to Hal’s shoulder and bit his mouth to the blood to stop it. He felt the waves of Hal’s orgasm pulling at his body, tightening on his aching cock, felt Hal’s quiet stuttered breath and the quiver of his body beneath him. He dug in and held on. 

“Hey baby,” came Hal’s slurred voice, and a hand reaching around to his ass, pulling him in even tighter, and Bruce made a strangled sound, his vision spangled at the edges, and he was cumming, cumming so hard his lungs could not take in air. There was no word for the sweet release of it, for the way his body kept spasming. He thought he was done, and then another wave took him, God he was buried so deep in Hal and it felt so fucking, fucking good. He knew he made some animal noise, but he was beyond caring. 

He slid to the mattress beside Hal in a sweaty shaking heap. Hal flopped down beside him. “You okay there?” he said, and Bruce nodded, still panting, waiting for his body to come back online. There was a voice at his ear. “Because you don’t really look okay,” said the voice, with amusement curled inside it like a cat, and Bruce pushed at him with a clumsy arm that couldn’t even connect with anything. Hal seized his arm and started kissing it. 

“We better get going, babe,” he said cheerfully, sliding off the bed with a last kiss to the inside of Bruce’s wrist. 

“Just. . . give me a minute,” he murmured, and that was another annoying thing about Hal, was how quickly he could recover from mind-obliterating orgasm – cumming his brains out one second, whistling cheerfully and going about his day the next. 

“Come on you slug,” Hal said tossing a shirt at him. “I’m not gonna be late because of you. You’re not gonna make me look bad in front of Damian, I am not having it.”

Bruce watched him dress, watching him dig through drawers and toss rejected shirts aside. “I’m thinking I should tell Clark and Lois that’s a no on dinner tonight?” he mused. “Or maybe I should plan on going somewhere else for dinner, and you and Damian could hang out alone. I dunno, your call. Oh did I tell you what I found out doing that diagnostic on the Javelin? I mean first off, those engineering patches we put on last year have still held up, I’m kinda impressed with our collective ability to engineer while stuck on a space rock staring impending death in the face, so go us. But yeah, turns out some of those sub-routines were messed up to begin with, totally not our fault, but it could still stand a good strip and re-boot, not that that doesn’t like a fun way to spend thirty hours, still, it’s one of those gotta-be-done things. Oh and then Barry was thinking—though why I’m listening to anything Barry says about engineering I have no idea, he has this idea because he’s a scientist that it’s all sort of the same, right, I swear to Jesus sometimes—”

He closed his eyes and let himself drift. He would still be asleep if Hal hadn’t been so loud on the phone – who the hell woke up at eight in the damn morning on a Saturday? Or any other day for that matter. His body must still have been on eastern time, probably. Or Hal had just been obnoxiously loud on the phone with Clark, which was equally a possibility. It had been one of the recent joys of his life to see Hal and Clark enjoy each other so much, to watch their mutual respect blossom into an easy friendship. Of course, plenty to be nervous about there, too. The thought that Hal and Clark might discuss him at some point was an uncomfortable one.

A pair of pants smacked him in the face. “You’re not listening to a goddamn word I’m saying, are you?”

“Something about Barry?”

Hal rolled his eyes. “Come on, get your lazy ass up, we gotta leave in like ten minutes.”

“Wasn’t my idea to take it slow,” Bruce grumbled, swinging his legs over the bed and fumbling for some pants. Those had actually been his pants that Hal had thrown at him, he discovered. Somewhere under the bed was likely his shirt. Or was that under the sofa too? Details of last night were unclear. Could locate the lube with no trouble, but not his shirt. Well, that was priorities for you. He plucked through the shirts in Hal’s drawer to see if there was one he might be able to pass off as his. He could hear the water running in the bathroom, Hal humming to himself as he shaved. 

It was one of the joys of being with Hal that the man had no real attachment to any particular schedule, and was infinitely flexible. He didn’t seem to mind the destruction of the day he had planned, and was happy enough to head to Gotham with him. A good quality in the field, too – if a particular plan didn’t work, Hal cheerfully jettisoned it and adopted a new one. Not that planning was ever Hal’s long suit. 

Except once. 

His hand stopped as it leafed through the shirts. Hal had planned everything that had happened to him in this past year, and it had just about worked. Almost had. Would have, except for one miscalculation. It was Bruce’s presence on Oa that he hadn’t factored in – that had been the point (as far as Hal was concerned) where his plan had gone off the rails. He pulled out a shirt and went to the bathroom, stood there in the doorway watching Hal finish his hasty shave. 

“Aim that glare somewhere else, you’re gonna mess me up,” Hal said, working on his upper lip.

“Why did you think I wouldn’t come?” Bruce said.

Hal laughed and rinsed his razor. “Oh I knew you would cum, baby. I’ve been able to make you cum when you were on enough meds to tranquilize a horse, so trust me, it’s not something I worry about.”

“No you idiot,” Bruce said. “Last year. Why did you think I wouldn’t come to Oa?”

Hal stopped. Resumed a careful wipe of his razor. “We need to get going, this is what you wanna do now?”

“Actually yes. It’s exactly what I want to do. Why did you think I wouldn’t come to Oa?”

“I didn’t really think about it,” Hal said.

“Now who’s bullshitting?”

Hal sighed, wiped his face down. Tossed the towel aside. “Okay, fine. I guess I thought, even if you did pull some dumb-ass maneuver like try to come to Oa or whatever, that it wouldn’t do any good because they’d never let you see me. Honestly I didn’t think it was an issue.”

“Because you didn’t think I’d come.” 

“I thought you might give it a try, and then go home.”

“But it didn’t enter into your calculation that I wouldn’t give up. That I would stay.”

Hal had his arms crossed, leaning on the sink. He looked thoughtful. Wary. “I guess maybe not.”

“Because what didn’t occur to you, was that my feelings for you might be as powerful as yours for me.” 

Hal said nothing. “And what I need to know is this,” Bruce continued. “I need to know if you still think that.”

The bastard still looked thoughtful. “Yes and no,” he said, which punched the air out of Bruce’s lungs. 

“Hal—” he started.

“No just wait. Just wait. Just—hang on a minute. There are some things you’re not—okay, you’re a not-completely-awful pilot, do you remember when you learned to fly?”

“Not completely awful?”

“Okay, fine, you’re a good pilot, if you ever tell anyone I said that I will slice your nuts in your sleep. But new pilots, the thing is, the hardest thing they have to learn is to instrument-fly, you know?”

Bruce narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Stop avoiding the subject and explain to me what the hell—”

“You can take a new pilot,” Hal said, riding over him, “and you can teach them everything they need to know about their instrument panel, and they can pass every instrument test with perfect marks. But you stick them in a cloud so they have zero visibility, and their instruments might tell them one thing, but absolutely ten times out of ten they are not gonna trust their instruments, they’re just gonna keep making this little course corrections – just a degree here and a degree there – just to try to make what their instruments are telling them match up with what their eyes are telling them. And ten out of ten new pilots fly out of a dense cloud bank completely fucking upside down, is what I’m telling you.”

He was still holding his razor, and he became intensely interested in it, rubbing at a spot on it. “Your instruments can tell you one thing, but if there’s another voice inside you, it’s sometimes not easy to listen to your gauges. And sometimes—” He set his razor down carefully. The muscle in his jaw was so tight Bruce could see it flex from three feet away. 

“That’s what I meant by yes and no,” he said finally. 

Bruce put himself right in front of him. Put his hands on his face. “Everything,” he said hoarsely. “Everything that son of a bitch ever told you is a lie,” he said.

“I know.”

“He never knew the first thing about you. Not one single goddamn thing did he know.”

“I know that too,” Hal said. 

“Then listen to me, and not to him.”

Hal nodded. “I know, baby.”

Bruce tipped their foreheads together. He could wish Martin Jordan would rot forever in the flames of the hell he was surely inhabiting, but the damage he had done would still live on. He had glimpsed it before, this part of Hal that would never truly believe in anyone’s love for him, because how could they? How could he believe in it, when he had half an ear cocked for that voice in the next room over? They had never talked about it, not really. Only once, after Bruce had seen what he had seen in the Lantern force, after he had felt what it was like to draw breath as that little boy. And then he had done it so clumsily, had said none of the right words. He had confronted him about it, and of course Hal had shut down hard, of course he had. And he hadn’t found the words to bring it up with him since then. 

But maybe the thing to do was not to argue with that voice. Maybe the thing to do was shout it down. “I love you,” he said. 

“Yeah, I know.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because you wrote it to me. It was in what you wrote. But you were wrong.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You were thinking that you should have said it to me, but you were wrong, I should have been the one to say it that morning, the morning before I left. But I was afraid that if I said it, I wouldn’t be able to go. I wouldn’t be able to do what I knew I had to.”

Bruce nodded, his forehead still leaning against Hal’s. “I know,” he said.

“So in case you were wondering, I love the fuck out of you.”

“I wasn’t wondering.”

“Good.” Hal leaned in and kissed him then, tipping Bruce’s head back, holding him tight. He let himself sink into Hal’s kiss, let himself be held. “Hey,” Hal whispered. “Speaking of.”

“Mm?”

“Speaking of what you wrote, I mean.”

“Less speaking,” Bruce said, pulling Hal’s mouth back to him. 

“No, for real. I never told you how much I liked it.”

“You punched me in the face. I feel like your feedback was clear.”

“No, that was—come on. It was a lot to take in. I was just angry, all right? And I said I was sorry.”

“Not. . . actually, no.”

“Well, I am. And I love what you wrote. I read it a lot.”

He frowned. “You do?”

“Yeah. Well. . . some parts more than others.”

“Interesting. Which parts?”

Hal’s lips grazed his jaw, the side of his face, his ear. “Which parts do you think?”

Bruce pulled back, looked at him. “Really,” he said. 

“Yeah, really. Jesus Christ baby, you could write sex for a living, are you kidding me? And I love it because, you know, you don’t ever say any of that in bed, so it’s like I get this window into your head, and also it’s incredibly fucking hot, so, you know, win-win.”

Bruce considered. “I am not. . . excellent, at that part,” he said. “At the saying what I feel part. In bed or out of it.” 

Hal’s laugh was gentle, and came with a kiss brushed on the other side of his face. “Yeah, I’m familiar. I’m just saying, I’ve got an assignment coming up’s gonna have me off-world for a couple of weeks, and you know. . . I could use some new reading material, is all I’m saying.”

“Oh is that so.”

“Yeah baby, that’s so.” He grazed one last kiss against his face, his lips. “And now what’s gonna happen is, you are gonna throw your clothes on and we are gonna get the hell out of here, because like fun are you making me late. Come on, I’m serious. I need to not be the dad-stealing douche before I even get out of the gate here. Let’s move it, Spooky. Are you seriously not gonna shave?”

He leaned past Hal and studied himself in the mirror. “It’s fine,” he said. 

“Yeah, you only say that because you’re not the one kissing you. No, I take it back, don’t shave, it takes you for-fucking-ever to shave, don’t do it. Come on, shirt on, let’s go.”

“It does not take me forever to shave,” he grumbled, but he pulled on the shirt he had stolen from the drawer. It smelled of Hal. 

“That’s my shirt, where’s your shirt?”

“Not sure. Does it matter?”

“Well, what if Damian recognizes that it’s not your shirt, and then he knows you borrowed mine, and there’s our cover blown, and he hates me forever, the end.”

“Is there a disaster movie playing endlessly in your head all the time? You’re exhausting.” But he sighed and stalked into the living room, where his shirt was crumpled and stuffed half-underneath a chair. What the hell had they been doing last night? 

Hal grabbed a jacket and followed him. “And you’re an unbelievable hypocrite, Mr. ‘I will write down forty-seven different disaster scenarios and hold training exercises for all of them before breakfast.’ Okay, how do I look? Is this okay? I have no idea how people dress on horse farms.”

“Horses are easy to impress.”

“Hey wait, you actually ride, don’t you?”

“From time to time.”

“You any good?”

Bruce shrugged. “I do all right. I was competitive for a while, when I was younger.”

“Oh yeah, why’d you stop?”

“I’m too large for competitive hunter-jumper, really. My build is fine for casual riding but not what you want if you’re looking to win.” 

“And you like to win.”

“Everybody likes to win, Jordan.”

“I mean I guess you could ride one of those Clydesdales or something, like they’ve got for the Budweiser wagon.”

“Good Christ,” Bruce muttered. “I’m six feet, not a freak of nature.” 

“Some ways yes, some ways no,” Hal said, and his hands wandered down Bruce’s hips, came to rest cupping him through his jeans. 

“That is not the answer to getting us out of here fast.”

“Mm,” Hal said, clearly considering it. “Bet I could get you off in four minutes.”

“You could, but since you’ve never met a sexual encounter you couldn’t turn into a forty-minute sheet-ripper, I’m saying no and shoving us both out the door. Come on, there’s a whole life outside that door we have yet to get to.”

“Yes there is,” Hal said, and he bent one arm around Bruce’s neck, pulling him in for one last crushing kiss. And then his hand was on the knob, and the day’s sunshine flooded in, and Hal stepped through it with a grin, his other hand firmly in Bruce’s.


End file.
